


Shine Beyond the Pavement

by temporalheadache



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: But You Kind of Have to Love it Anyway, Canon-Typical Violence, Complicated Relationships, Gotham City is Terrible, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Minor Character Death, Mutual Pining, Other: See Story Notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:07:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27170831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/temporalheadache/pseuds/temporalheadache
Summary: After running into each other across a fresh corpse in a damp alley, Dick Grayson and Jason Todd end up working together to untangle a case that takes them across Gotham.
Relationships: Dick Grayson/Jason Todd
Comments: 9
Kudos: 65
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	Shine Beyond the Pavement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [diefleder_tey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/diefleder_tey/gifts).



> See end notes for warnings that will spoil things.
> 
> Set approximately in the Rebirth era, although not at any specific point in time.
> 
> All thanks to K, who did not kill me when I said, "Hey, can you read this over for me? It's 20k words long and I need to post it in a day and a half."

The man on the ground has no throat left. Dick knows there’s a good chance it’s a lost cause even as he drops from the fire escape into the alley—he can hear the bubbling of blood and see the colour draining out of the man’s skin. By the time he gets close enough for a good look, the sounds have stopped and the man’s eyes have gone flat.

“Damn,” Dick says. He eyes the carnage quickly, taking in all the details even as he wishes he’d gotten there a few minutes earlier.

If he can’t save the man, he still might be able to catch whoever did this—he’d seen a slight shadow heading down the alley as he’d come down from the roof, and he heads that way, moving as silently as possible. The area he’s in is all warehouses and shortcuts, a tangled maze of dead ends and garbage that he can only hope the killer doesn’t know very well. There’s a trail of blood on the ground for a short distance past the corpse, but it only lasts long enough for Dick to make it to a crossroad, two equally dark, narrow alleys shooting off from this one. He pauses and listens, hoping he can hear someone moving.

There. To the left. Someone large, trying to be quiet; if Dick were nearly anyone else he probably wouldn’t have picked up on them. He slips his escrima out of their holders and prepares himself for a fight.

* * *

Jason hates the waterfront district. He knows the layout like the back of his hand; between the times he'd crashed out here as a kid and the times he’s spent chasing penny-ante thugs through the docks, he’s had to learn and relearn the tangled paths through it. That doesn’t mean he’s learned to like the smell of rotting fish or the constantly damp ground, though, and the rain they've had through most of October hasn't done the place any favours.

He'd been watching a man guarding a warehouse when the man had suddenly looked up, at something Jason couldn't see, and then taken off into one of the dark alleys nearby. By the time Jason had made it to a spot where he should have been able to track the guy, he was gone. A quick search across the rooftops hadn't revealed any sign of the man, or anyone else, for that matter. Now he’s in the alleys themselves, following a faint smell of blood. There’s no guarantee that has anything to do with the guard, this being a back alley in Gotham and all, but it seems as good a place to start as any.

As he reaches the corner of the alley, he hears a slight shift ahead of him, and tightens his grip on his gun—

* * *

Dick goes low around the corner, knowing that would-be attackers tend to assume that their target's going to be coming at them straight on. He shifts into a leg sweep—

And then stops, awkwardly balanced, and says, “Red Hood.”

* * *

Jason pauses in the middle of bringing his gun towards his assailant and sighs, dropping out of attack mode and resisting the urge to knock Dick over before he can get back up.

“Nightwing,” he acknowledges.

Dick’s already up and moving towards the alley straight ahead. Jason considers following him, then glances down the alley that Dick had popped out of and sees a corpse. He can't tell for sure, but it looks a lot like the guard he'd been watching. When he turns to go after Dick, he sees him already walking back towards him, shaking his head a little at Jason's unasked question.

“Dead end,” he says.

“Well, no one got past me,” Jason says. “And no one went past you. So where’d they go?”

They both turn and look back at the dead body. Jason heads over it to it, walking carefully around the blood spatter, and squats down next to it. It’s definitely the same guard, although he’d had a lot more neck the last time Jason had seen him. He looks at the wounds and frowns. Something seems off.

“What the hell did this?” he asks, looking up at Dick, who’s pacing the alley, looking into the old broken crates and boxes that are jammed against the walls.

“I didn’t see,” Dick says. “I got here just in time to hear him drop. I saw movement further down the alley, but they’d vanished by the time I got close enough to see anything.” He pauses his search and drops down across from Jason, a small line forming between his eyebrows as he looks at the dead man.

“It looks like it should be an animal attack, but it’s not,” Jason says, pulling out a flashlight and shining it on the wound. “That isn’t teeth. Some kind of weapon?”

“No sharp edges,” Dick says, vaguely. He reaches out and wraps his hand around Jason’s, re-angling the light as Jason blinks at the sudden warmth. “Not clean enough for any kind of blade. Not anything that went all the way around his neck, either, because there’s no ligature marks.”

Jason notices a sliver of something that catches the light, and hands the flashlight to Dick in order to grab a set of tweezers from a pouch. It takes a second to get it out, as it's buried deep in the flesh. The blood makes it hard to identify at first, but when Dick shines the flashlight full on it, Jason figures out what it is.

"It's a fingernail," he says.

They both look back down at the body, remapping the gore in their heads. What had looked like possible weapon marks now look like furrows caused by someone dragging their bare hands through skin and muscle. They’d caught the artery, but not gone through the tougher tissue of the throat. Not claws, either; no sharp points, like Dick had said. There’s still something off about it, though, and he tilts his head, trying to get the thought clear.

* * *

Dick shifts the flashlight, trying to get a better sense of the wound: the spacing of the fingers, the angle of the hand. A cold feeling slides down his spine as he holds his own hand out, above the corpse’s neck, and uses it as a comparison point.

“That’s a very small hand,” he says.

“Shit,” Jason says.

They both sit back, looking at each other; Dick doesn’t need to see Jason’s face to know that he’s thinking the same thing. If they're lucky, this was done by an adult with very small hands. The shadow Dick had seen earlier was slight and small, too. He really wants it to be an adult, even as he knows it probably wasn't.

But what the hell kind of kid is capable of tearing out a grown man’s throat with their bare hands?

A Gotham kind, Dick thinks, a second later. Because that’s the kind of city this is.

“Why are you here?” he asks Jason, belatedly.

“Human trafficking case,” Jason says. He carefully puts the fingernail back into the wreckage of the man’s throat, leaving it as evidence for the cops, then stands up. “They’re running out of the warehouses down here. Rotating locations, no real pattern to it. Hard to track.”

“Adults or kids?”

Jason shakes his head a little. “Adults, I thought,” he says. “Migrant workers, lied to about their status, IDs taken away from them, forced to ‘pay off their debts’ by working for free. Hadn’t heard anything about kids.”

“Maybe someone branched out,” Dick says.

Jason tucks the tweezers away, carefully putting them into a sealed bag first; Dick sometimes envies his pockets, but they’re not practical for him. He hands over the flashlight silently, mulling over what they know.

“You?” Jason asks. Dick blinks at him before realizing he’s asking what Dick’s doing here.

“Weird deaths,” he says.

“We’re in Gotham,” Jason says. “Weird deaths here are dying peacefully of old age, surrounded by your loving family.”

“Yeah, but a guy doing a flip when he’s jumping off a roof is pretty weird too,” Dick says, not arguing Jason's point. “Unless suicidal dive team is a new Olympic sport. The Russian judge probably gave it a 3.”

Jason snorts and Dick bites back a smile. He likes it when he and Jason are on the same side, actually working together. It doesn’t happen as often as it should.

“Deaths, plural,” Jason says.

“Yeah. Three suicides, including the diver, and two murders. The only connection I found is that one of the suicides picked up labour work around the docks, and one of the murder victims worked for a company that owns some warehouses around here.”

* * *

“Not much of a connection,” Jason says. He wonders if any of the warehouses are the ones that the traffickers have been using—he’ll have to follow up later. Right now, they need to figure out where the killer got to.

He starts looking over the side of the alley he’s on while Dick does the same across from him. There’s a lot of junk piled up nearby, and Jason’s careful not to move any of it out of place as he looks for any kind of hiding place or escape route. He’s wary: the guard that was killed wasn’t exactly a small man, and anyone who can rip a guy’s throat out with his or her bare hands is someone to be careful around, small hands or not.

After a few minutes where all he’s unearthed is a truly horrifying amount of mysterious fluids and a lot of fat, fearless rats, he sees the glint of metal behind an old wooden pallet towards the end of the alley. When he tilts the pallet forward, he realizes that it’s a small sewer grate, slightly ajar.

“Think a kid could get down there?” he asks, and Dick comes over to take a look. Jason takes out the flashlight again and shines it into the hole.

“Maybe,” Dick says after a minute. He tilts his head and Jason can practically see the physics running through his mind, not numbers like Drake would have, but the kind of understanding of space that comes with spending half your childhood flying through the air and needing to stick the landing.

“Yeah,” Dick says, finally. “Not a teenager, unless they were really undersized. But a kid could fit. And there’s a ledge just down below, not the full drop.”

So much for any real hope it was an adult, unless it was a particularly agile little person. Jason tilts the flashlight around, hoping for footprints or marks of some kind, but the ledge is clean. He sighs, knowing what’s coming next.

“So,” Dick says, “I guess we need to find our own sewer access.”

Jason grumbles a little. “We’re not even sure he went down there,” he says.

“No, but it’s the only place that makes sense,” Dick says. “Look, you don’t have to come—you can go back to whatever you were doing. I’ll let you know when I find anything.”

Jason’s honestly not sure if Dick’s trying to get rid of him or if he’s being nice, but either way, Jason knows he’s going into the sewers whether Dick likes it or not. For one, this kid killed the guy he’d been trailing. For another, he might not always like Dick Grayson, but he’s sure as hell not about to let him walk into the sewers after a mysterious murder child without any kind of backup. Even if they don’t run into the kid, Gotham’s sewers are home to a lot of people—with “people” covering a pretty wide range of creatures—and most of them don’t take too kindly to the masks and capes showing up in their territory.

“Nah. I’ll just burn these boots when we’re done,” Jason says.

It takes them a few minutes to track down a sewer access that’s actually accessible. Jason pulls up a map of the sewers on his helmet’s display as Dick slides down the ladder onto the ledge below, then follows him into the dark.

* * *

Even though he’d given Jason a look when Jason had bitched about the sewers, Dick can’t exactly claim they’re his favourite part of the city. The rooftops, yes, where there’s the closest thing Gotham ever gets to fresh air, and where the problems all look manageable. Even the streets aren’t so bad, as long as they aren’t filled with murderous mayhem. But the sewers are awful, and out here, by the harbour, they’re at their worst.

He’s gotten good at breathing shallowly, but it doesn’t help, really, when the air is so thick with rotting sewage that he wishes he could just strap on a gas mask. The slime on the walls and underfoot slows him down, and the way it fills back in as they pass makes it impossible to track footprints. The best they can hope for down here is a sound, unless they happen to stumble upon the assailant.

Unfortunately, all he can hear as they walk along is the disgusting sucking sound their feet make, with a faint background noise of dripping water. He pauses for a second as they pass near a manhole, but the only change is that he can hear some traffic overhead. There’s no sign of anyone down here, and Dick’s starting to think they followed the wrong trail.

Suddenly, Jason stops, holding his hand up and going very still. Dick waits, and then hears the sound of someone coming down the sewers towards them. It’s definitely not a kid, given how heavy the footsteps are. Dick has a bad feeling he knows exactly who it is.

Half a second later, Killer Croc rounds the corner and slams into Jason, tackling him backwards onto the ledge. Dick manages to jump out of the way in time to avoid getting hit himself, and grabs his escrima as Jason swears and fends Croc off by punching him in the throat. It’s a hit that would have knocked the air out of a regular human, but Croc merely coughs and goes back after Jason.

“We’re not coming after you!” Jason manages.

Dick shoves one of his escrima between Croc and Jason, blocking Croc’s snapping teeth. “We’re looking for a lost kid,” he says, hoping that Croc’s in a sane enough state of mind to listen.

He breathes out when Croc stops attacking and looks up at him.

“I ain’t got any kids down here right now,” he says.

“I know,” Dick replies. Bruce keeps an eye on the inhabitants of the sewers, making sure that anyone who wants out has access to help. Kids are a top priority.

“Mind letting me up?” Jason asks. “Or can I at least get you a breath mint?”

Croc grunts, irritated, but stands up, and Jason gingerly gets to his feet. Dick can just tell that Jason’s about to make some kind of snarky comment about his jacket and the sewer goo, and while he’s usually a big fan of the quips, Croc's ideas of what counts as funny too often involve a body count.

“Have you noticed anything unusual in the last few hours?” he asks, cutting Jason off. “Anyone who shouldn’t be here?”

There’s a very long pause. Dick’s not sure if that means that Croc’s trying to think, or if he’s just not interested in talking to them. He waits, because there’s not much else to do at this point. Croc’s the best lead they’ve got down here; he knows just about everything that happens in the sewers, and he’s got a soft spot for kids, especially the lost ones.

“Didn’t see him myself, but one of the old-timers down here saw a kid earlier,” Croc says, finally. “Said there was somethin’ weird about him. Didn’t look right.”

“How so?” Dick asks.

Croc shrugs, a complicated motion with his collection of scales and spikes. “Don’t know,” he says. “Gary’s not a big talker. Just said the kid looked…” There’s a long pause. “Blank.”

“Blank,” Jason repeats.

“Blank,” Croc says.

“Great,” Jason says.

Croc turns, and Dick says, “Wait. Have you smelled blood anywhere around here?”

“Other than on you two?” Croc asks. “No. Tide’s coming up, though. Tends to wash things away. Might wash you away if you don’t leave.”

It’s a threat as much as a warning, but it’s undermined when he stops just at the edge of the corner to the next tunnel and says, “You both friends with Arsenal?”

Dick says, “Yeah,” and Croc nods and says, “Tell him I said hi.”

* * *

Jason opens his mouth to say something, but Croc’s already gone, into the—now very watery—muck below. From the look of things, he wasn’t wrong about tide coming in. Jason is really not in the mood to deal with swimming in sewage, so he shrugs and says, “Exit up ahead, right.”

It says something about the sewers that even Gotham’s harbour is a refreshing breath of air after being down there.

“Well. That got us nowhere,” he says, taking off his jacket and looking at it. He’s pretty sure it’s not coming back from the sludge stuck to it. “And I’m down a jacket. Should’ve let you go alone.”

“I did offer,” Dick says, and Jason rolls his eyes even though he knows Dick can’t see it.

He brushes some of the muck off of his jacket and goes over what they’ve got so far in his head. A “weird”, “blank” kid who probably murdered a grown man by tearing his throat out with his bare hands, Dick’s “weird” deaths, and Jason’s traffickers, who are by far the most normal part of this mess. This being Gotham, it’s disturbingly possible that none of this is actually related, but he’s not going to assume that anything’s a coincidence.

“Look, we both need a shower,” Dick says, and Jason pauses, blinking as his brain switches gears. “Let’s just—get cleaned up and follow our own leads, see if they cross over anywhere.”

“Right, yeah, shower,” Jason says, still thinking about showers, and Dick, and trying very hard not to think about Dick in the shower. He’s going to blame it all on the sewer gases, which have obviously affected his mind, because he’s usually not quite this stupid even when he’s distracted.

“Yeah,” Dick says, giving him a look. “And someone’s bound to notice a blood-covered, sewage-smelling kid if he shows up again.”

“Might not say anything about it, though,” Jason says. “Especially around here—”

Hm. That’s an idea.

Croc might not have any kids in his sewer kingdom right now, but Jason’s willing to bet that there’s a few warehouses around here that’ve been taken over by the street kids and runaways. He’d crashed in those places pretty often himself as a kid; safety in numbers and a roof over your head wasn’t much, but it was better than most of the alternatives.

“Around here what?” Dick says. “Did the sewage finally get to you? Tell me you didn’t puke inside that helmet. That would be so gross.”

“No, ew,” Jason says. “No, I just had an idea. I know it’s a foreign concept to you, but sometimes people think.”

“Head empty, no thoughts, just vibing” Dick says, grinning.

“You’re way too old for memes,” Jason tells him.

“And you’re way too sewage-y for me to keep standing here. Set your comms up, I’ll let you know if anything comes up. Show me your warehouses and I’ll show you mine?”

Jason bites back a far-too-inappropriate reply and just waves vaguely in Dick’s direction. “Yeah, yeah.”

They split up, Dick back up to the rooftops, Jason slipping away down the alleys to where he left his bike. He can’t wait to get out of his gear, but he may as well make a stop at the most likely flop houses first. No point in getting all clean just to walk back into that mess.

* * *

A long, hot shower, and a quick meal, and Dick feels like a new person.

He’d considered trying to dig into the company that owned the warehouses, but he’s not in the mood to sit in front of a computer, reading corporate documentation. Instead, he’s out tracking down witnesses and investigators, trying to tie together the five deaths that he’s sure are related, if he could only figure out how. It’s the kind of case that’s mostly intuition, a sense that something is off just enough that it’s worth looking into, and those are the kind that require a lot of footwork. If he were Bruce, he’d be out putting the fear of bats into the shadier characters; if he were Jason he’d be working underworld contacts. Tim would be in the corporate paperwork.

Dick’s leaning in the doorway of a guard booth at Gotham Rail, chatting to an older woman named Eloise Sinclair about her years on the job.

“You know,” she says, leaning back in her creaky office chair. “I solved a murder once.”

“Oh?” he asks.

“Yep,” she says, proudly. “The cops didn’t believe me that the girl was pushed. Said she jumped. Now, I know my jumpers. You work here long enough, you see them all. But I knew something was wrong, and I went to see Mr. Ballister, who used to own the bodega down the street, God rest his soul, and got his security footage, and then I went to see Miss Louise who used to work the corner, and then I went to the cops with footage of the girl who got pushed, the poor child, and the man that done it, and a description of him from Miss Louise. She found Jesus, you know. Turned things around. Runs a bookstore now.”

Dick blinks, trying to follow the story, and assumes that “Miss Louise” who used to work the corner found Jesus, and not the dead girl.

“And they caught him,” Eloise tells him. “Caught him and he confessed, too, and he went to jail.” She looks very satisfied at that, the lines around her mouth deepening as she smiles.

“That’s good detective work,” Dick tells her, and means it.

“Well, someone has to do it,” she says, nodding slightly. “It’s why I always watch the security footage when someone jumps. You just never know. Besides, someone needs to pray for them.”

She looks up at the rails above them, high above the city, and shakes her head. “You know,” she says to him, “I’ve been asking for fifteen years for a higher fence up there. I’ve put up signs. I got the suicide hotline memorized. The cops ‘round here all know me. And we get so many of ‘em, and somehow the city built a nice new station down where the big fancy banks are and can’t afford an extra few feet of fence for here.”

Dick looks around the neighbourhood, which is the kind of poor that’s still got some pride left. The houses might have some peeling paint and sagging roofs, but they’ve got neat lawns and careful gardens, and there’s no trash piled up. It’s the kind of place that the city government tends to ignore, not rich enough to be worth courting and not poor enough to be causing problems for the neighbours.

“Now, the young man you were asking about,” Eloise continues, not waiting for a reply to her comments about the fence. “That was a strange one, alright. I’ve seen more than my share of jumpers, you know, and I ain’t never seen one do an actual dive. He did a flip, Mr. Nightwing. An actual flip. Like he was jumping in a pool, off some high board.”

“Did anything else stand out about him?” Dick asks.

Eloise looks thoughtful, and turns to stare up at the rails again. “You know,” she says. “He was smiling. Like he was having fun. Sometimes they look kind of peaceful, you know, like they know that their suffering is about to end, but they don’t tend to look like they’re having fun.”

She looks up at him. “Well. Until he hit the ground, anyway. Can’t smile much without a face.”

Dick winces at her matter-of-fact voice, and gains a new level of respect for this woman who watches people fall to their deaths in case she can help.

* * *

Jason had though the sewers were bad, but at least they just smelled like sewers. The warehouses smell like the past: fresh piss and old vomit, stale cigarettes and clothes and people that haven’t been washed in weeks, or months. It’s the same smell as when he was younger, and he wonders at the fact that he didn’t really notice it back then. It was just a part of the world he lived in. Now, it makes him want to grab every kid in here and haul them into somewhere with hot water and real food.

It wouldn’t work, he knows. The kids that last long enough on Gotham’s streets to make it here tend to be highly resistant to any kind of authority figure taking them anywhere, even with promises of better things. They know too well that most of those promises are lies, and even when they aren’t, there’s a trade off involved.

Jason could try to convince them otherwise, but he'd have to get them within hearing distance first. He’d had to bribe them with Batburger gift cards to even get one of them—their spokesbrat, Jason thinks—to come stand in the same room as him. He’s better off asking direct questions and getting out of here, and then letting Dr. Thompkins know about this place.

“Ain’t seen nothing,” the kid says. He’s maybe about thirteen, fourteen, scrawny and tense, with hair that might be blond under the grime.

“Haven’t even asked you yet,” Jason says. “I’m looking for a kid. Weird one. You know the kind, the ones you don’t want to let in because they might just burn the place down for fun, or cut your throat while you sleep. Those ones.”

The kid looks back at the doorway into the main part of the building, then back at Jason. “Might’ve heard something about one of ‘em. What’ll I get if I tell you?”

Jason isn’t sure if the kid’s telling the truth or lying in hopes of more gift cards. “Depends on if you’re shitting me or not,” he says, evenly.

The kid glares at him, unimpressed, and Jason waits it out. Patience isn’t the kid’s strong suit. Sure enough, the kid gives in after a few long seconds.

“Look, he was a fuckin’ creep,” the kid says. “Not giggling or stabby or whatever, just, like.” He gestures up at his face, and goes expressionless for a moment. “Like that. Like there wasn’t no one home inside him. He didn’t ask to stay here or nothin', just came by, asked us where to find the guys movin' people around.”

“Moving people around?” Jason asks.

“Yeah, like. The slave traders. Those guys.”

The traffickers. So the kid was looking for them, specifically. At least it’s a lead.

* * *

“I’ve been a beat cop in this neighbourhood for twelve years, and I’ve seen my share of domestic violence cases, but this one was…strange,” Eleanor James says, drinking her coffee and leaning up against the side of her squad car. She’s got lines around her eyes and a steadiness that Dick suspects serves her well in her job.

“What was strange about it?” he asks. The neighbourhood they’re in is solidly middle-class, nice houses, new cars parked out front, but everything paid for with loans and mortgages. He can hear kids playing down the street. It’s not his usual haunt, and he feels oddly exposed out here, even in the shadow of the building he’s leaning against. It’s a public library, and the sign outside is advertising a program where kids can read to dogs. He’s not sure if the dogs get a say in the choice of books or not.

“Usually when the guy gets what’s coming to him—sorry, but it’s true—the woman is having a meltdown. They just break. It’s messy. They don’t pull a tarp over the nice rug in the back porch so the blood doesn’t stain it before they shoot the guy in the back of the head. They don’t do the dishes afterwards while they’re waiting for the cops to come. They don’t make us tea.”

“She made you tea?” Dick asks.

“A nice herbal blend,” she says. “My partner, Hitch, she’s new to all this, just a rookie. Sweet girl. The body, she could handle. But—” Officer James pauses and takes another sip of her coffee, her mouth pressed into a flat line for a few seconds before she speaks again. “We had to ask why she did it. I knew, I could tell. No house is that perfectly clean without someone being scared out of their wits about what happens if there’s a mess. But—this lady, Mrs. Wagner, she just dropped her dress right off of her and showed us the scars. She started naming them, how he’d done each of them. Then she realized that Hitch was upset, and apologized, and got dressed again and put on the kettle. We probably shouldn’t have had the tea, given that she’d just murdered her husband, but I’ve been at this for long enough to know that she’d killed the only person she was going to kill.”

“How did she seem during all of this?” Dick asks.

“Calm,” James says, after a moment. “Relaxed, even. When the coroners arrived, she asked them to be careful in the garden, as she didn’t want the lilies to get trampled. She asked us to wait for her to put together a plate of dinner for Mrs. Ferreira down the road, and then she called up the neighbours to let them know that someone would have to bring Mrs. Ferreira dinner on the nights she usually did.”

She drains the end of her coffee and tosses it perfectly into the garbage can on the corner.

“When we dropped the food off, Mrs. Ferreira took one look at us and said, ‘it’s about time she did something about that bastard.’ I guess she’s been telling her for a few years to just kill him already. I have to say, hearing a sweet old lady in a homemade sweater with a dachshund on it calmly tell you that she’s happy someone’s dead is… Well. It’s something.”

She looks around and then looks Dick straight in the eye and says, “I tend to just stick with telling the truth when people go on trial, but I’ve already told my captain that I’m going to argue like hell that this was self-defence, planned or not. Those scars—Hitch wasn’t the only one put off by them. But besides that, Mrs. Ferreira said that Mrs. Wagner was the quietest, most scared woman she’d ever met. I guess the only time she was allowed to leave the house was to go bring dinner down to Mrs. Ferreira, and then only because all the neighbours took a turn doing it and her husband didn’t want anyone to notice anything strange. So maybe that was just her way of snapping. She got pushed so far that she stopped being scared.” James shrugs. “Or maybe it was cold-blooded murder in the first degree and I’m just getting soft in my old age.”

“Oh yeah, the ripe old age of, what, 29?” Dick says, smiling when she laughs, the tension breaking.

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she says. “But the coffee is what convinced me to talk. You’re welcome to come by any time if you bring caffeine.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says.

“Well, back to the grind,” she says, stretching and opening the door to her car. “You need anything else, you know where to find me.”

Dick steps further into the shadows as she leaves, trying to fit the pieces together in his head. A joyful suicide and a relaxed murderer. He can tell that he’s getting somewhere, but there’s still so much missing. He hopes Jason is having better luck.

* * *

Jason’s pretty sure he’s gotten everything he’s going to get out of the street kids. It’s not much, but it’s more than he had before. If the kid was looking for the traffickers, that’s Jason’s next stop. He’s already got a good idea of their movements; the only reason he hadn’t gone after them yet is because he was hoping to get a lead on the people hiring them. They’ve got small fish written all over them, but now’s not the time to go searching for sharks.

As he’s pulling out the last of his gift cards, he hears a brief but unmistakable sound, and he freezes. The kid in front of him looks like he’s about to bolt, but Jason’s faster; he grabs the kid by the arm and holds him in place.

“That was a baby,” he says.

“Let go of me, you fuck,” the kid says, trying to wrench free.

“No,” Jason says. His voice is a half-growl, and the kid’s smart enough to stop squirming, recognizing that Jason is an actual threat. He still doesn’t say anything, though, remaining sullenly silent.

“You want to live like this, fine,” Jason says, gesturing with his free hand to the trashed warehouse. “Maybe you like livin' in your own shit and eating rotten garbage. I don’t know. I don’t care. You’re old enough to make that choice.” The kid’s not, not really, but Jason’s not about to press that point right now. He’s got more important things to deal with. “Maybe you’ve got a plan. Maybe you’re gonna grow up—if you don’t freeze to death, or get stabbed, or get sick and choke to death on your own vomit, lyin' on the floor—and maybe you’re gonna, what, work for some low level gangster? Be cannon fodder for a wanna-be supervillain? Fine. Chances are I’ll find your corpse someday, but that’s your choice. Babies? Babies don’t know that they’re choosin' this. You. Don’t. Keep. Babies. Here.”

“Fuck you,” the kid says. Jason tightens his grip, just enough to make the kid uncomfortable. “Fine. But good luck getting him away from Gina.”

The back room has about a half-dozen kids in it, ranging from maybe eight to somewhere in their teens. They mostly shy away from Jason when he comes in, shifting like they’re ready to run. He ignores them, heading right for the one with a bundle in her arms. She might be fifteen, maybe sixteen, but she’s underfed and hollow-eyed and it makes her look younger. He hopes that’s it, anyway, because from the way she’s holding the baby he’s pretty sure it’s hers. He stops in front of her.

“No,” she tells him, staring up at him. “No, you’re not taking him. He’s mine. You can’t—”

“Come on,” he says, softly, and holds out his hand to her. “I’m not going to take him from you. I’m going to take both of you to someone who can make sure you’re able to look after him.”

She doesn’t move, and he reaches down and gently nudges back the blanket, revealing the baby’s face. He’s too thin and he’s too pale, and he doesn't make a sound when Jason puts the blanket back.

“Look at him,” he says to her, still quiet. “You know that he’s not doing well. You know.”

She looks down and shifts her grip, pulling him closer, but then she looks back up at Jason and he can see the defiance fading away, replaced by a kind of bone-deep desperation. He holds out his hand again, and she takes it. She’s far too light as he pulls her to her feet, and he has to steady her as she sways.

“Can I carry him?” he asks.

“No,” she says. He settles for keeping a hand on her back as they walk, ready to catch her if she stumbles.

As they walk, he looks around and says, “If any of the rest of you want to get the hell out of here, you can come too.”

“Don’t need no social workers,” one of the kids says.

“Do I look like a fuckin' social worker?” Jason asks. One of the younger kids giggles slightly.

There’s a few whispered conversations as they head out, and he’s not surprised when a couple of the kids follow. He wishes it were more, but he knows if he tries to force the kids to come with him, they’ll just run away again and go to ground somewhere even less safe. At least this way he knows where they are, for now.

His bike isn’t enough to hold all of them, so he calls up Leslie. It’s not long before she’s there with a van from the clinic, and he slips away as she’s examining the kids, not wanting to deal with any questions. He’s too angry, and he’s had to hold it in to deal with the kids. Lashing out at them wouldn’t have changed the fact that they live in a city that’s willing to let them starve on the streets.

He can’t hit the city, or their parents, or any of the things that have added up to this. He can, however, hit some traffickers. And he knows just where to find them.

* * *

“She just—she just walked out in front of the truck, like it wasn’t even there. She was…” The girl across from Dick curls up on herself, wrapping her arms around the fat orange cat in her lap. He’s leaning up against a tree at the base of her apartment building while she sits on the stoop.

“I’m so sorry you had to see that,” he says, quietly.

“I don’t understand. She was in the middle of a sentence. I just—she can’t have seen it, somehow, it wasn’t… She didn’t kill herself. It was an accident.”

Dick isn’t sure how someone could miss a full-sized transport truck ten feet away from them and moving fast, but every witness had said the same thing: the young woman had just walked right in front of it, completely oblivious to her impending death. The coroner had emailed a colleague to ask if he’d ever heard of something like that, and they’d gone back and forth about possible explanations, from temporary hyper-focus to some kind of sudden hearing loss. One of the emails had just said, “I need to find an explanation so I don’t have to call this a suicide. We had to bring her mother in to identify the body. I need to be able to tell her it was an accident.”

The girl on the stoop is the victim’s best friend, and she’s still clearly in shock. The cat in her lap turns and licks her face as she starts crying again.

“When I went to pick up Orange Juice—” she nudges the cat— “her dress for her date was laid out on her bed. Her breakfast dishes were still in the sink. She had a book out that she was halfway through reading.” She looks up at Dick. “Someone who was going to kill themselves wouldn’t leave their dress out for that night.”

“No,” Dick says, although there’s no guarantee of that. Still. It’s strange. “Was there anything that she mentioned that was unusual?”

The girl shakes her head, then stops, and says, “Well. The fact that she had a date at all. She was pretty shy, and she’d had a thing for this guy for, like, months? But she was convinced he wasn’t into her. So it was weird that she asked him out—she’d said she just felt… Fearless. For a minute. And—” the girl’s face crumples again. “And now she’s dead and she can’t— Oh god, has anyone even told him?”

Dick reaches out and puts a hand on her shoulder as she starts crying again. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I promise I’m going to find out what happened.”

It’s not much, but it’s all he can offer.

* * *

Jason grunts as the man he’s fighting manages to get a solid punch into his solar plexus. He’s wearing enough body armour that he shouldn’t even be able to feel it, but there’s something wrong with the traffickers—they don’t seem to care that they’re hurting themselves as much or more than they’re hurting him. The next one takes a swing at him with a hand that he’s sure is attached to a fractured arm, and he hears another crack as he blocks it.

The traffickers had been easy enough to find. He’d walked in the front door of their current warehouse, pointed his gun at the leader, and asked him who might be trying to kill him. That part had been fine.

Then the guy had run straight at him, Jason had shot him in the shoulder, and the guy had kept coming.

That part hadn’t been so good. Especially when one of the early hits had somehow knocked his entire communication system offline. No backup on this one.

So now he’s got six guys trying to kill him, and another four already unconscious or unable to get to him. He’s used to fighting people who stop when they get hurt, although this isn’t his first time going up against someone in a crazed kill mode. There’s something unsettling about these guys, though; they seem focused, but not psychotic, and they’re just very…

Calm. They’re oddly calm.

It’s a weird word to apply to someone who’s currently trying to get a hand around his throat, but it’s true. They don’t seem to be frantic or terrified, they’re just relentless and, apparently, immune to pain.

He winces as one of them gets a good jab in at his ribs, which are sore from an earlier hit with a piece of wood. Every time he thinks he’s managed to get them to back off, they’ve come back at him, and even though he’s geared up enough that they can’t do any major damage, he’s starting to feel like this might be a death from a thousand cuts situation. Their numbers mean that he’s mostly been on defence, unable to get a good grip on any single one of them at a time, which means that he’s stuck working on disabling them in bits and pieces. The man who’d just gone after his ribs takes another shot and Jason manages to grab his arm and pull, dislocating his shoulder.

The man merely grunts and switches hands. Jason gives up and dislocates that shoulder too, then doubles over as one of the others rams a knee into his stomach.

This would be a hell of a lot easier if he could just kill them, but dead men don’t answer questions.

* * *

Dick’s eyes are starting to glaze over from digging into the backgrounds of everyone involved in the strange deaths. He wishes he could just resurrect the victims and ask them what the hell happened, because right now, he’s got a lot of puzzle pieces that don’t go together. There’s no real pattern here: they’re different ages, races, genders; they run the range from well below the poverty line to comfortably middle class; they’re scattered around the city. They don’t go to the same places, they don’t know the same people. He’d had some brief hope when there’d been some social media overlap for the ones who used it, but it had just turned out that was mostly local weather reporters and celebrities.

Other than that, nothing. Not a single real connection.

He’s starting to wonder if this case is all in his head.

* * *

The man’s head hits the concrete with a thud that makes Jason wince, but he’s still breathing. The two seconds it takes him to make sure are costly, because one of the men left standing has found the piece of wood Jason had knocked aside earlier, and he takes a baseball swing at Jason’s side that hurts like hell even through the padding. The next swing is at his knee, and if he hadn’t shifted at the last second, it might have done some serious damage. As it is, Jason’s going to have a limp for a bit, and he’s slow on his next dodge. Luckily, the guy catches the padding of his jacket, and Jason twists around to grab the wood for himself. Inexplicably, the guy then tries to headbutt him, the crown of his head cracking against Jason’s helmet before he drops to the ground, dazed.

To hell with this.

Jason twirls the piece of wood around in his hand before bringing it down on the head of the guy in front of him, then cracking it across the jaw of the guy trying to tackle him from the side. He turns to look at the final guy standing and waits. Ordinarily, this guy would either give in or run for it. Instead, he charges at Jason, who steps to the side and clotheslines him with the wood. The guy chokes for a moment, and Jason takes that opportunity to clock him on the back of the head and put him down for the count.

He looks around the warehouse. There’s no one left standing except for him, but a couple of the guys are still conscious. They just can’t get at him, what with the broken legs.

Walking over to one of them, he leans down and says, “So. Who pays your bills?”

* * *

Dick had finally given up and switched over to looking into the company that owned the warehouses out by the docks. Their financial statements are pulled up on his computer, but nothing about them stands out to him, and he's got the beginning of a headache forming behind his eyes from staring at endless rows of tiny numbers. Just as Dick’s about to call time out and come back to the case later, the police scanner he's got running in the background catches his attention.

“…kid covered in blood over on…” crackles a voice.

He turns up the volume.

“Does the child seem to be hurt?” the 911 dispatcher asks.

“How the hell should I know?” the caller replies. “Look, lady, I’m born and raised here and I didn’t make it to 68 years old by going up to people covered in blood and checking up on them. That’s how you get stabbed.”

Dick has to admit that the man has a point.

He listens to the rest of the call as he gets geared up, then tries to reach Jason, frowning when he doesn’t get an answer. He can only hope that it’s because he’s in the shower or asleep, and not that something’s happened to him. He could call into the Batcave, get whoever's there to track him down, but… Things get pretty high tension at this time of year, as every costumed whackjob seems to think they're being clever by planning something for Halloween. Adding Jason into the mix isn't likely to help. If things go sideways, he’ll reach out.

For now, he heads out in hopes that the kid’s left enough of a trail for Dick to follow him—and that it doesn’t lead to the sewers again.

* * *

Jason should, by all rights, be headed back to his own place. To be fair, he had stopped there for long enough to grab a change of gear and a quick shower. The only thing he hadn’t grabbed was a replacement for his helmet, which might explain why he’s sitting on Dick’s couch, trying to reconnect the wire that had gotten jarred loose. He’s pretty sure he’s made it worse; Roy’s going to shoot him.

The thing is, it would be easier to do this in his own workroom, where he’s actually got the equipment to deal with it. Dick’s place is a mess, and if he’s got a set of wire pliers or a tiny soldering iron anywhere, Jason would be shocked. So again: he should really go home and fix his helmet. Maybe take a nap while the bruises multiply.

Instead, he’s still in Dick’s apartment, which is notably lacking in an actual Dick Grayson.

It’s always tempting to poke around at times like this, and he could probably get away with a little bit of looking, but he knows that Dick would know. The fact that his stuff is scattered all over the apartment wouldn't make a difference; Dick would be able to tell immediately if Jason so much as nudged a sock a couple of inches to the left. That’s part of the territory when you’ve been trained by master detectives.

Luckily, he doesn’t have to do any digging to find the notes for the cases Dick’s looking into, because they’re sitting on the side table, next to a mostly-empty coffee cup. Jason sighs and puts down his helmet, his fingers starting to hurt from trying to do detail work without the right tools for it. Dick had already told him about the cases, albeit in passing. There’s no harm in looking through Dick’s notes—especially given that it's likely his own case is related somehow.

Five minutes later he’s pulling out Dick’s laptop; ten minutes after that he’s wired it to the TV and Dick’s tablet, because one tiny screen isn’t enough for doing any real digging. At least Dick’s gotten the actual human interaction over and done with.

* * *

Finding the kid turned out to be fairly easy. He hadn’t actually gone far from where the man had called the cops, and he doesn’t appear to be trying to hide. He’s certainly not trying to shed his bloody clothing, and between that and the sewage, Dick could probably follow him by smell alone.

His guess at the sewer grate seems to be about right—the kid looks about eleven or so, on the skinnier side, with shaggy brown hair and a lack of expression that puts Dick on guard. He’s fought enough people who aren’t quite there to recognize the signs, and he’s seen the carnage this kid is capable of. The blood splattered across his chest and face and the handprints smeared across his jeans where he'd haphazardly wiped off some of the gore are a warning loud and clear to anyone who looks at him. That might explain why the street they're on is completely empty, although it could just be the freezing, stinging rain that had started up a few minutes ago. Either way, Dick's happy not to have any extra complications to deal with.

He drops lightly down from the storefront roof he'd been standing on to watch the kid and walks into the open. There’s every chance that this kid is scared out of his mind, even if he’s not showing it, and Dick doesn’t want to spook him into making a run for it. He stands carefully, both hands visible and open, weapons secured, but still within reach. He wants to appear non-threatening, but he's not about to underestimate the kid.

“Do you need help?” he asks, voice even and friendly.

The kid stops and turns to look at him. There’s no change in expression, not that Dick had been expecting one. He waits.

He waits a while longer.

The kid doesn’t answer him, but he doesn’t move, either.

“Are you hurt?” Dick tries.

The kid blinks, once. Dick isn’t sure if that’s a yes or a no.

It’s possible the kid doesn’t speak English, he realizes. He could try another language—Spanish, maybe? As he’s trying to figure out if the kid’s looks indicate any particular heritage, the kid finally takes a step towards him. Then another.

Dick fights the urge to fall into a more defensive stance. There’s something about the very deliberate way that the kid is walking that makes Dick think that this is not an attempt to get help. He really, really hopes that he’s not about to have to fight a kid.

The kid gets within a few feet of him and stops. Dick breathes out, breathes in, and just barely manages to dodge out of the way as the kid flies at him with unexpected speed. If he hadn’t spent so much time training with Damian, he would have gotten caught, no question. He shifts away again as the kid takes a second swing, then steps back as the kid swipes at him with his other hand.

It’s at that point that Dick notices the knife clutched in the kid's fingers.

* * *

Jason frowns, tapping his fingers on the arm of the couch as he scans through more documentation. He’d replaced Dick’s ancient cup of coffee with a fresh one for himself, and he’s needed it to make heads or tails of the paperwork he’s going through. Whoever had set up the maze of companies, numbered companies, sub-corporations, shell corps, shelf corps, dummy corps, brands, and trademarks had done a damn good job of it. The underlying financials were even more complex, with money being routed up to a half dozen times between various accounts, mostly off-shore, for almost every transaction.

The good thing about real estate is that it’s, well, real, so Jason’s focusing on that right now. Someone has to be on the title, and even if it’s a vague, useless name like “Gotham Harbour Holdings (Holdings) LLC in trust”, at least he can mark that name down and work backwards from there.

He pulls up another set of company records and starts again, looking for those little connections that he knows he’ll find. It’s not exciting work, but when someone’s gone to this much trouble to hide themselves, he can’t help but want to peel the layers off.

Vaguely, he hopes that Dick’s doing alright.

* * *

Dick spins out of the way of another attempt to stab him and tries to figure out how to disarm the kid safely.

The kid’s not that fast or graceful, but he’s relentless and doesn’t seem to care about his own safety. If he were an adult, Dick would just take him down, but he’s worried that he might overestimate what that would take and cause real damage. He tries to grab the kid’s wrist, carefully, but the kid wrenches it free.

Then two things happen at once: Dick steps backwards, right onto a slickly wet piece of pavement, and the kid takes a wild upward swing with the hand holding the knife.

If Dick hadn’t been so good at keeping his balance, he would have gone straight backwards, and the knife would have missed him altogether. Instead, he only tilts a little off-balance, and the knife catches him right along his cheekbone, skimming the very edge of his mask as he flinches away from it. It stings, but he’s more concerned about what might come next than he is the wound.

The kid takes another swipe at him, and this time Dick manages to catch him just long enough to twist the knife away. He’s so focused on making sure that he doesn’t hurt the kid that he’s not prepared at all when the kid goes for his throat again, bare fingers scrabbling at the neck of his costume. Dick flashes back to the man in the alley and throws himself backwards before the kid can get a grip.

The worst thing about the fight, Dick thinks as the kid makes another lunge at him, isn’t the fact that he’s barely holding his own against a prepubescent killer. It’s not the fact that the kid’s expression hasn’t changed, although that’s certainly disturbing. It’s the silence. The kid hasn’t so much as grunted, and Dick can’t bring himself to make any of the usual quips that he uses to throw his opponents off guard.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks, finally, blocking yet another attempt by the kid to grab him.

The kid blinks, going still; Dick thinks for a second that he might have gotten through.

Then the kid knees him in the groin and takes off in the few seconds it takes Dick to recover. Well-built protection or no, the kid had a sharp little knee.

He’s already down an alley by the time Dick gets after him, and with the fading daylight dampened by the clouds overhead, the alley isn’t so much shadowed as it is one big shadow. Dick turns on his night vision, but it’s too late. The kid’s gone.

* * *

Jason looks up as Dick comes in, frowning when he sees the open cut across Dick’s cheek.

“The hell happened to you?” he asks, shedding the fortress of technology he’s built around himself so he can stand up and walk over to Dick.

“Psycho kid has a knife now,” Dick says, stripping off his mask and wincing as it pulls at the cut. Jason makes a disgruntled noise and smacks Dick’s hand away when he goes to touch it.

“Get your first aid kit,” he says. “You don’t know where that knife’s been.”

Dick mumbles something, but heads towards his bathroom anyway, coming out a moment later with a well-stocked first aid kit. Jason takes it from him and shoves Dick onto the couch, sitting next to him before he starts going through the kit. He turns Dick’s face towards him more gently than he’d meant to, trying to focus on the cut and not how close they are. Dick’s skin is cool and damp against his fingers as he brushes a bit of mud away from the wound.

“Not deep,” he says. “No stitches needed.”

“There goes my Frankenstein costume,” Dick says, grinning, then wincing when that stings.

“Monster,” Jason says, absently. He starts to clean the wound.

“What?” Dick asks.

“Frankenstein’s monster. Frankenstein was the scientist. You've met him, you should know that.”

Dick blinks up at him with ridiculously dark eyelashes and Jason looks away, grabbing for the tube of antibiotic cream that he’d spotted earlier.

“You’re a dweeb,” Dick tells him, very seriously.

“At least I didn’t get stabbed by a child,” Jason says. “Stop talking until I’m done.”

Jason can tell that Dick’s about to stick his tongue out at him, so he holds his ointment-covered finger in front of Dick’s mouth, figuring that might stop him. Dick rolls his eyes instead, but he does stay quiet as Jason applies the cream and a bandage. If he runs his fingers across the edges an extra time, it’s just because he wants to make sure it’s secure, and has nothing at all to do with the unexpected softness of Dick's skin.

“I tried to reach you, you know,” Dick says.

Jason packs the kit up before he answers. “Some thug decided to use my head for batting practice, blew out my comms,” he says, flicking a finger in the direction of his helmet. It’s in better shape now, but he needs something to reconnect one last wire before it’ll be fully functional.

“Well, it is a big red target,” Dick says. “Who were you fighting?” He gets up, wincing, and vanishes into his room, coming out a few minutes later in sweatpants and an old hoodie.

Jason stretches out across the couch and catches Dick up on his adventures, then listens as Dick tells him about the strange, murderous child.

“I think it’s definitely safe to say our cases are related,” Dick says. He yawns and slumps down a bit on the chair he’s sitting in. Jason wonders how he can fold himself up like that; if he tried it, he’d lose feeling in at least three extremities.

“Yeah,” Jason says. “What do you think, familiar face or new player?”

Dick hums tunelessly, dropping his head back to stare at the ceiling. Jason stares at his throat, which has faint scratches on it, and tries to answer his own question.

“Who do we know that’s used kids before?” Dick asks. “Croc sometimes has some in his…people, but he doesn’t use them. That other sewer guy?”

“Dead,” Jason says. “Fell into lava.”

Dick gives him a look and Jason says, “Joker’s Daughter, not me.”

“Well, he’s probably out, then,” Dick says.

“Mad Hatter?” Jason offers.

“No Alice in Wonderland theme, and boys aren't his type,” Dick says.

“Right.”

Jason rolls his shoulders and rearranges himself on the couch. The problem with Gotham, he thinks, is that only here could “who could be using a possessed/drugged/brainwashed child to kill people” have this many answers.

* * *

Dick wonders who they’re missing. It shouldn’t be hard to come up with answers for this, but he’s disturbed to realize that he’s probably forgotten people that have used kids for their crimes.

“Mother and Cain are both dead—I hope. The Court?” Jason looks at Dick, knowing that he knows more about the Court of Owls than any of them except maybe Bruce.

Dick makes a face. “I hope not. They’re pretty obsessive about Talons. Dead kids turned into assassins?” He goes silent for a long moment. “I can see it, actually. Damn. Yeah, they’re on the list.” He grabs a piece of paper and a pen, writing down everyone they’ve come up with so far.

“And wasn’t there some creepy lady who turned dead kids into dolls?” Jason asked.

“Yes,” Dick said. “There was a whole family of absolutely psychotic doll-obsessed people. They were—”

“The guy who cut off the Joker’s face, right?” Jason asks. “Too bad his knife didn’t slip.”

“He’s a skilled surgeon, for a serial killer,” Dick says.

They both lapse into silence, aside from the scratching of the pen on paper. Dick looks up to find that Jason has his eyes closed, but he’s still frowning; he hasn’t fallen asleep.

“And it could be someone we didn’t even think of, or someone new,” Dick says, finally.

“Sometimes I hate this city,” Jason says. He sits back up, rolling his neck. “Your couch is a piece of shit, by the way. I’m pretty sure I’m being violated by a spring.”

“Bite me,” Dick says.

“No, I’m in a committed relationship with the spring now,” Jason says. “I’m not a cheater.”

Dick flips him off, trying not to make it too obvious that he’s grateful to Jason for a break in the horror.

“So,” Jason says, looking at the list Dick has put together. “Time to start crossing names off.”

“Yep,” Dick says. He hands the list to Jason. “I got a pretty good look at the kid—I’m going to get Alfred to run him through facial recognition, see if we can track him down.”

“Mm,” Jason says, already at work on Dick’s laptop. Dick eyes the multi-screened techno-monster that has taken over part of his apartment, opens his mouth to say something, and decides it’s just not worth the conversation they’ll have to have if he does.

Instead, he calls Alfred and sends over the file.

* * *

“Yeah, he tried to kill me. Yes, I know he’s a child. It’s not like it’s the first time that’s happened,” Dick says.

Jason’s not eavesdropping, but Dick’s still in the same room and it’s hard not to hear him.

“Mm. Mm hm. OK. Thanks. Yeah, I’ll tell him. Yeah. We’ll let you know. Thanks.” Dick hangs up and drops back into the chair with another yawn. “Alfred says to tell you that ‘Master Bruce will be away at a meeting in Metropolis next week, should you happen to be in the area’.”

Jason smiles, both at the implied invitation to come by and see Alfred without having to get into an inevitable fight with Bruce, and also at Dick’s passably good Alfred imitation. When Dick yawns again, Jason waves a hand at him.

“Take a nap. It’s going to be a while before I can get all this done,” he says.

“What are you even doing?” Dick asks, squinting at his TV, which has an automated spreadsheet scrolling by.

“Running our suspects through the tracking database that Drake put together. Also, putting together a financial trail for all these companies,” Jason says. “I pulled all their records, the program’s just matching up amounts and dates and names. It’s—” he looks at Dick, who has the glazed over expression of someone for whom “data scraping” is a foreign concept. Jason's not Drake or Babs, but he's still a world above Dick when it comes to technology. “I’m hoping it’ll point us in the direction of some real people.”

“OK,” Dick says. “Right. Good work.” He settles back into the chair. Jason looks at him for a moment, then shrugs; if Dick doesn’t want to sleep, he doesn’t have to.

Five minutes later, Dick’s fast asleep in the chair. Jason sighs and turns down the alert volume on his computer set up, then drapes a blanket over Dick. It’s not that he’s being soft, he tells himself, it’s just that if Dick gets a cold, he’s going to be the whiniest baby to have ever sneezed.

That’s definitely it.

* * *

Dick wakes up from his unplanned nap to the sound of running water and a vague but persistent dinging noise coming from some device somewhere in the room.

“Jason?” he says. “What’s trying to get your attention?”

“You?” Jason asks, sounding confused. He walks out of Dick’s kitchen, a plate and dishtowel in his hands.

“I’m not beeping,” Dick says. He’s not awake enough to deal with Jason in an old pair of Dick’s pyjama bottoms that don’t quite fit him and a baggy t-shirt from some charity event Dick had gone to, much less Jason being casually domestic in Dick’s apartment.

Jason blinks at him, then says, “Oh, right,” and disappears back into the kitchen. When he comes back, his hands are empty; he sits down on the couch and picks up a tablet, frowning at it as he reads.

Dick watches him sleepily, not realizing he’s staring until Jason looks up at him and raises an eyebrow.

“It’s still going through the details,” Jason says when Dick just shrugs, “but here’s something interesting: an old chemical factory that was bought out by one of these companies suddenly had the power and water turned back on a few weeks ago. No sign of anyone being hired or any announcements about it going back into production.”

“Huh,” Dick says. “You know, it’s been, hm, six whole days since I had to fight someone in a decrepit, probably toxic, disused chemical factory.”

“Gotta get that quota met,” Jason says. He stands up and stretches; Dick watches the gap between his shirt and pants too openly, realizes it, and looks away.

“Right,” he says. “Let’s go try not to get poisoned.”

* * *

“I bet you five bucks it’s Scarecrow,” Jason says, quietly. They’re on the roof of the lab, trying to get a sense of the layout. The blueprints he’d been able to pull up only showed the basic walls and not the actual lab structure, and the last thing either of them wants to do is drop down and land in something horrifying.

“No deal,” Dick says. “Mysterious chemicals, people acting weirdly—that's definitely his M.O.”

Jason pouts, not that Dick can see him. “That’s no fun,” he says. “Besides, usually people that Scarecrow’s messed with are terrified messes. These guys were anything but.”

“Point,” Dick concedes. “But still.” He peers down through a skylight that shows an abandoned conference room. “Any sign of life?”

Jason’s got infrared scanners running, but the building’s got incredibly thick concrete walls, chilled by the cold night air. The tiny flickers he’s getting could be people, electronics, or small animals. “Nothing major, but it’s hard to tell,” he says.

“There’s no security system here,” Dick says, testing the edge of the window with one finger. “I say we just head in.”

“Yeah,” Jason says.

He pries the window open pretty easily, wincing as it creaks a bit when the rust pulls apart. Dick checks the room below quickly, then does a flip off the edge of the roof, landing lightly on his feet inside. Jason knows that Dick’s just showing off, but he still feels like an elephant landing next to him with a solid thump. They both go still, waiting for any sign that they’ve been heard, but the building is as silent as ever. Jason’s going to be pretty damn annoyed if they came all the way out here and it turns out that the company’s just using the place for storage or something.

* * *

The lower levels of the factory are cold and damp, with a lingering odour of mould and chemicals that makes Dick’s nose itch. The main production area had been empty, so they've headed towards the back rooms that are most likely labs. Jason’s ahead of him; they hadn’t discussed that, but he’s got better armour and there are a lot of blind corners in this place. Whoever had built the lab had apparently gotten a bulk discount on giant concrete slabs and decided to use them for every single wall.

Jason peers into a doorway and stops, then gestures Dick forward. He follows Jason into the room and looks around at the various beakers and vials set up on every available flat surface, except one ancient, worm-eaten desk in the corner that's covered in papers instead. High-tech, this place is not, but the equipment looks very new and very expensive, and the liquids in a bunch of the containers have to be recent. They’ve found…something.

While Jason looks at the chemistry set ups, Dick heads over to the desk, checking for anything that might be a trap or surveillance system on the way. There’s nothing around, which is either relieving—if whoever’s set up this is wasn’t expecting company—or worrying, if they don’t care if someone finds them. There’s a set of notebooks on the table and a series of well-chewed pens next to them. Dick flips open the closest one carefully, not wanting to move anything. The handwriting inside is familiar. If he’d taken Jason’s bet, he’d have owed him five bucks.

“Scarecrow?” Jason asks softly, walking over.

“Got it in one,” Dick says.

“You owe me five bucks,” Jason says.

“Didn’t take the bet,” Dick replies. “And I’m pretty sure you drank at least five bucks of my coffee.”

“Yeah, but I also did your dishes,” Jason says. Dick can hear the amusement in his voice and shakes his head a little, focusing back on the notes in front of him.

“Here,” Jason says, nudging him to get his attention. “Look at this. ‘While the idea of studying fear by removing fear has its merits, the first subjects appear to have lost all sense of danger to themselves, and did not survive the experiment long enough for proper observations to be made. Further adjustments are needed.’ Guess that’s your supposed suicides.”

Dick thinks of the girl who walked in front of a truck, and her traumatized friend and broken family, and feels anger wash over him. At least the coroner will be telling the truth on the death certificate.

He opens another notebook. “And here’s the murders,” he says after a moment. The notes outline a second set of experiments, balancing the removal of fear with the desire for self-preservation. He skims over them quickly—Crane seems to have been trying to find a breaking point in people, removing some aspects of fear while amplifying others. Most of the technical notes are above Dick's ability to understand without some serious focus and note-taking of his own, neither of which he has time for right now.

“Hey,” Jason says. “Here’s something interesting.” He points at a little side note on a page that’s otherwise filled with notations. “He’s complaining that his patron won’t let him pick his own subjects. He's not the one calling the shots here.”

“What’s that next bit?” Dick asks, tilting his head.

“Oh, uh. ‘I do so wish that he would stop referring to my test subjects as ‘tasty little lab mice’, although I do suppose I must respect his dedication to the theme.’ Tasty? I really hope this isn’t a cannibal thing.” Jason sounds disgusted.

“No one’s been eaten,” Dick says, then pauses. “That we know of.”

“Great,” Jason says. He flips another page, then freezes at the same time Dick does. Somewhere in the hallway outside are footsteps.

* * *

Jason swears under his breath and flips off the light he’d been using. Dick’s already on the move, silently making his way up higher; there’s a series of pipes and vents above, as well as a few large fans, and Dick disappears quickly into the darkness above. Jason settles for sliding behind an old cabinet full of moth-eaten safety gear, pulling out his gun as he goes.

Dr. Jonathan Crane walks into the room, fully dressed in his Scarecrow costume. Jason wonders how he gets any work done like that, but clearly the man’s had practice at it by this point. He walks over to one of the chemistry stations and flicks on a Bunsen burner, then pauses and lightly shakes one of the vials nearby. Jason stays as still as possible. Catching Scarecrow would be perfect, but he’s in his own lab right now, and Jason doesn’t particularly want to get caught in a chemical attack. Hopefully it’s a short visit, and they can grab him on his way out, away from his tubes and vials.

Unfortunately, as the minutes pass it becomes clear that Scarecrow’s settled in to work for the night. He wonders if they can somehow cause a distraction outside and separate him from his lab, but neither of them are in a position to get out the door. He could try shooting something outside, but the sound inside would be just as loud. This might be a long wait.

And then Scarecrow mixes two things together that cause a massive cloud of stinging, caustic smoke to rise high in the air, and Dick starts coughing.

“Shit,” Jason says, stepping out and taking aim. He manages to wing Scarecrow in the shoulder with a rubber bullet as the man jumps, looking up with a frantic, skittish motion that makes him a difficult target. Jason wishes he’d loaded tranq darts instead, although Scarecrow's built up some odd immunities over the years.

Dick drops down on Crane from above, but he’s still coughing, and he can only grab at part of Crane's costume. It tears slightly as Crane jerks away, giving the scientist just enough extra reach to grab a few vials.

“Now, now,” he says, holding them up. “I’m not quite sure what I’ve grabbed, here. This could be harmless if I drop it. Or it could kill us all. Do you want to find out which it is? Science is so exciting!”

Dick risks a glance at Jason, but he doesn’t have any way to get to the two of them before Scarecrow could drop the vials. With slow, careful movements, Dick lets go of Crane and steps back.

“Ah, good choice. Safety precautions are so important in lab settings,” Scarecrow says, waving his hand around in a way that makes Jason’s whole body go tense.

“Interesting experiment you’re running,” Dick says, conversationally. “Removing fear. Not your usual style. Are you branching out?”

“I’m so glad you asked,” Scarecrow says. “You see, I had someone come to me with a fascinating proposal. What better way to learn about fear than to understand how people work without it? See the shape of the thing from the absence of the thing! I had tried something similar before, on a much grander scale, but this particular experiment had some interesting twists.”

“And this person also, helpfully, funded your work?” Dick asks. “They must be a real supporter of science.”

Jason edges closer as Dick keeps Scarecrow talking. He’s hoping he can incapacitate him and grab the vials at the same time, but he’ll settle for being close enough to grab anything that Crane drops.

“Why, yes,” Crane says. “As much as I do prefer to fund my own projects, they can be so expensive, especially when I’ve been so unfairly blacklisted from scientific supply companies.”

“Very unfair,” Dick agrees. Jason hears the wry tone of his voice, but Scarecrow doesn’t seem to.

“Just because I prefer to blaze my own trail, they shun me. Absurd!” Scarecrow shakes his head. “Luckily, my investor has such wonderfully useful connections.”

“But it must come with some strings attached,” Dick says. “I can imagine that those must be frustrating.”

“Well, yes,” Scarecrow says. “I keep trying to explain to him that in order for my experiment to be truly useful, I must be able to select my own subjects. It's so important to have key comparison points. However, I have had some success despite the frustrating limitations.”

Jason is nearly there when Scarecrow takes a step forward, towards Dick.

“Of course,” Scarecrow says, “If two such useful test subjects happen to walk right into my lab, I can hardly be faulted for putting them to use.”

He drops one of the vials; Dick reaches out for it, realizes he’s not going to get to it in time, and makes a break for it instead, throwing himself as far back from the shattering glass as possible. Jason’s got a filter on his mask, so he’s not as worried about breathing anything in, but he still has to dodge when Crane throws another of the vials directly at him. He’s always a bit quicker than Jason expects, some kind of nervous energy keeping him wired up.

Before he can make a grab for Crane, the man is off running, throwing the final vial at Jason for good measure. Jason gets out of the way of that one, too, and takes two steps after Scarecrow before stopping and turning to Dick.

“You okay? What was that?”

* * *

“No idea,” Dick says. “I don’t think it did anything.”

His breathing is steady and his heart rate normal, under the circumstances; there’s no unusual smells or tastes, and no odd sensations anywhere, other than the fading scratchiness in his throat. The puddles on the floor don't seem to be reacting to anything, and they don't have time to run any tests on them, with Scarecrow already on the move. He's got a head start, but if they move now, they should be able to take him down before he can even get outside.

Assuming, of course, that he doesn’t have anything else on him. Dick looks around the room, comparing it to how it had looked when they'd entered it, and realizes that two containers are gone from a table by the door.

“He got something,” Jason says at the same time.

“Yeah,” Dick agrees.

“Right. I’ll take the lead, hope that whatever it is gets filtered out if it’s airborne,” Jason says. He’s checking over his gun.

“Next time we decide to go sight-seeing at a chemistry lab, I’m bringing a gas mask,” Dick says. He usually does, for these kinds of jobs; he’s been a little off ever since the fight against the kid. It’s a tough case.

Jason 's already moving into the hallway. Dick follows him, waiting for Jason to clear each area as he goes. When they reach the main factory, Dick sees a flash of movement and looks up to see Scarecrow darting towards the door. Jason's got his gun up and aimed before Dick can so much as nod in that direction.

Jason’s first shot goes right past Scarecrow and his second one hits, but Scarecrow just shakes it off.

“That should have dropped him,” Jason says as Crane bolts out the door.

Dick frowns.

“You don’t think…”

* * *

Yeah. Of course Crane would take his own stupid formula. At least there’s only one of him, and he’s not exactly a physical threat, even if he’s turned off his own pain sensors or whatever that stuff does.

Still.

“This is going to suck,” Jason says, heading out onto the factory floor.

Dick doesn’t reply, and Jason takes a second to look back at him, seeing Dick stalled in the middle of the room with a look of concentration on his face. He must be hearing something over his comms, Jason realizes. His own are still partially broken, letting him talk to Dick but too weak to reach anyone else through the thick walls of the lab.

“Penny-One tracked down the kid,” Dick says. “I’ve got a home address. And apparently he’s shown up on a few traffic cams in the area.”

Jason looks at Dick, then at the door where Scarecrow had made his escape.

“Split up?” he says. “We can’t let Crane get away, especially with whatever he grabbed on the way out.”

Dick looks torn.

“Look, the kid’s one kid. Scarecrow has who-knows-what and could be headed towards a populated area. You can go chase the kid if you want, but I’m going after Crane.”

Jason doesn’t wait for an answer before he picks up the pace and heads towards the doors. Dick can make his own choices.

* * *

On the one hand, Dick feels like he should go after the kid. On the other hand, Jason’s right: Crane’s the bigger threat here, and a bigger unknown. He might have just grabbed some serum for his own use, but Crane’s always perfectly happy to throw the city into chaos if it serves his purposes, and they’re not far from busy areas. There’s at least a couple of streets of dive bars within a short distance of here, and Dick doesn’t want to find out what the kind of folks who spend their evenings there might get up to with their inhibitions turned off.

He follows Jason, moving quickly to catch up to him, then finding his way up an old fire escape for a better view of the area. He spots Scarecrow running down a side alley and directs Jason that way, following along on the edge of the rooftop.

Crane’s an awkward runner, long limbs windmilling like they're controlled by elastics, and he’s not helped by the fact that he keeps looking back over his shoulder. Up ahead, Dick spots a sheet of metal coming loose from an old vent cover. It's easy enough to get ahead of Crane and kick it down into the alleyway to cut him off.

There’s a loud crash and strangled yelp from below, and Dick looks down to see Crane stopped just short of the metal, clutching his vials in his hands and looking around frantically. When he spots Jason coming down the alley towards him, he takes a few shaky steps backwards, jumping again when he steps onto the metal and causes it to clang against the wall.

“Give it up, Crane,” Dick calls down. “Just turn yourself in. Maybe the judge will be nice to you if you hand over your employer.”

“Investor! I’m not some mere workhorse!” Crane yells back. He stares up at the roof, and then back at Jason. Dick can see what he’s about to do even before he lifts one of the vials he’s holding to his mouth, and he jumps into the alley a second too late to stop him.

* * *

Jason reaches Crane at the same time Dick lands.

Crane's still got his mask on, but he goes still almost immediately after drinking the substance in the vial. Having fought the traffickers, who were clearly on the same thing, Jason is pretty sure he knows what's coming next.

Sure enough, as soon as Jason gets within range, Scarecrow takes a swing at him. It's uncoordinated and weak, but he's using the arm still holding the vials, so Jason's forced to duck out of the way rather than blocking. Scarecrow’s next swing is at Dick, who dodges as well. Jason makes a grab for the vials as the arm swings past him again, but Scarecrow’s movements are erratic enough that he misses, as does Dick when Crane swings back at him.

The strange, bobbing rotation of Scarecrow’s attempts to fight them combined with his costume gives Jason the odd feeling that he might be fighting an actual scarecrow. For a second, he wonders what would happen if he knocked Crane’s legs out from under him: would a real man fall down, or would he find a figure on a stick, stuffed with hay, flapping in the breeze?

He shakes the feeling out of his head and eyes the vials in Crane’s hand warily, wondering if they’re having an effect on him, or if it's just the long day catching up to him.

“Hood!” Dick says, and Jason snaps back into focus just in time for Scarecrow to actually get a hit in. It barely registers, especially after the beatdown he’d taken earlier, and he’s not sure if he or Scarecrow is more surprised by it.

Nightwing grabs at Scarecrow’s arm as he pulls it back to swing again, tugging him off balance. Jason’s next swing for the vials is more successful, and he yanks them away from Crane as the man goes tumbling to the ground.

“Give it up, Scarecrow,” Dick says, twisting Scarecrow’s arm behind his back. He’s being careful, Jason can tell, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Scarecrow wrenches himself free by dislocating his shoulder with an audible pop that makes Jason wince.

* * *

Dick looks at Scarecrow, then at Jason, who has a firm hold on the vials, and decides that he’s done with this fight. When Scarecrow twists himself back around and makes a clumsy attempt at a tackle, Dick clocks him in the face, knocking him out cold. Scarecrow topples over, hitting the sheet of metal with a ringing crash that echoes down the alley.

“Effective,” Jason says, nudging Crane with his boot.

“I’m going after the kid,” Dick says. “Can you deal with this?”

“Cops don’t like me,” Jason says. Dick gives him a look and Jason relents. “Fine. Yeah. I’ll call it in, keep an eye on things but keep out of their way.” He taps his helmet. “Comms still aren’t great, though. You need me, you’ll have to figure out some other way to reach me.”

“Like what, a giant glowing red helmet in the sky?” Dick says as he makes his way back up a nearby fire escape.

“Sure, and then when someone inevitably decides it’s a sign of the apolocalypse, I can build a cult out of the true believers,” Jason says. “Go. I’ll catch up.”

Dick nods and takes off across the roof. He’s got a bike not far from here, and it shouldn’t take him long to get to the last known location of their no-longer-nameless murderous child. Barrett Kraus, age 12. He brings up his comms and calls Alfred, hoping he can get more detail.

“Ah, you haven’t heard,” Alfred says, quietly. Dick stops at the tone of Alfred’s voice, knowing that whatever is coming isn’t going to be good news.

“What?” Dick asks.

“I’m afraid the child has killed again. His own father, this time,” Alfred says. “The police were called by a, ah, working lady who happened to be at the house at the time. She’s fine, and the police took the young man into custody with no difficulties. I believe that they’ve just now been called to your most recent location, and informed of the chemical concoction that may be behind all this. Perhaps they’ll be able to find an antidote.”

“Yeah,” Dick says, faintly. “Maybe.”

“Don’t blame yourself for this,” Alfred says, immediately recognizing Dick’s tone. “You’ve been doing everything you can.”

“Sure,” Dick says. “I’m—I’m going to go, I left— Thanks.”

“Do let me know if you need anything,” Alfred says. The kindness in his voice makes Dick want to punch something.

* * *

Jason has just finished depositing a very thoroughly tied up Scarecrow in the lab when Dick walks in. He looks up, sees the anger in Dick’s movement, and settles back on his heels just in case he needs to defend himself. For all that Dick is the most likely of them to crack a joke, he’s also got a sharp temper.

“He still out?” Dick asks, coming to stand next to Jason.

“Yeah,” Jason says. “Probably for a while. You laid him out hard.”

“Fuck,” Dick says.

Jason waits, knowing Dick will either come out with what he’s mad about now or won’t tell him even if he asks.

Sure enough, Dick says, “The kid killed his dad.”

“Shit,” Jason says.

“Yeah.”

They stand in silence for a moment. Jason can think of a lot of things to say, none of which would help.

“We need to find out who hired him,” Dick says, his voice tight with anger. “And then we need to take them down.”

“Well, he’s not going to tell us,” Jason says. “The notebooks?”

“Right,” Dick says. He glances up, towards the door. “How long before the cops get here?”

“A few minutes, maybe less,” Jason says.

“Speed-read,” Dick says. “Just look for anything about his boss, then get out of here if you hear sirens.”

“Got it,” Jason says. He picks up the closest notebook and flips through it.

* * *

The cops come as Dick is finishing up his third notebook. Jason takes off without a word, disappearing up the stairs as the sirens come to a halt. His voice comes over the comms, crackling, to tell Dick he’ll meet him back at the apartment, and then it’s just Dick, the still-unconscious Scarecrow, and a lab full of questions.

Luckily, the police were smart enough to send veterans for this particular crime scene. Dick recognizes them all and breathes a sigh of relief when he sees how careful they are around the delicate and likely volatile chemistry equipment. It doesn’t take him long to get them caught up on the basics, and he manages to skim through another two notepads as they work on getting Crane properly restrained and out of the room.

“The drug makes him immune to pain,” Dick says as they haul him away. “Keep him secure, he’d probably be fine with breaking his own hands to escape, at least until it wears off.”

If it even can wear off. He’s got no idea about that.

There are a few notes in the notebooks about Crane's investor, but they don't shed any light on his identity, just Crane's irritation with him. Frustrated, Dick leaves before the next round of cops show up. He makes the ride back to his apartment in too short of a time, anger driving him to be more reckless than usual, and he opens his door so hard that the hinges creak.

Jason looks up at him from the couch and says, “I think I’ve got him.”

He taps something on the tablet as Dick walks into the room, and a photo flickers onto his television. The man in it is clearly trying to make up for his weak chin and small, watery eyes with an expensive suit and fancy haircut; it isn’t working. The name that pops up when Jason brings up a stat sheet doesn’t mean anything to Dick, either, and he knows most of the bigger players in Gotham. Either this guy’s from out of town, or he’s trying to make his way into the upper reaches and isn’t picky about who he uses to get there.

“Rupert Brannigan the third,” Jason says. “I’m still working out some of the details, but he’s got ties to most of these companies, and he’s the one who authorized the utilities for the lab—through a bunch of underlings, of course, but it ultimately came from him. My guess is that he’s the investor.”

“Where is he?” Dick asks. He looks over the information quickly as Jason stands up, grabbing his helmet from next to him.

“Out by the university.” Lots of money in that area, Dick thinks as he checks over his gear, making sure nothing was damaged in the fight. When he's done, he heads out. Either this guy's behind the deaths, or he'll likely know who is. Dick's ready to take him down.

* * *

Jason looks back at the computer with a frown. Something about this guy isn’t quite adding up, and he’d like to know why before they go after him. There are too many connections that have lead to dead ends, and too many well-buried bank accounts for someone that seems like he should be at best a mid-sized fish in the large, shark-filled pond that is Gotham.

But Dick’s already most of the way out of the window, and Jason knows him well enough to know that Dick will run straight into danger when he’s in this kind of mood. He’ll do it the rest of the time, too, of course. That comes with the territory. But when he’s mad…

Jason follows him with one last backwards glance at the computer screen.

Brannigan’s home is a large older building, slightly too small to be called a manor, tucked into a street of similar buildings. The little Jason had been able to dig up on the guy before Dick got back was pretty standard rich guy stuff: family made money on imports back in the mid-1800s, they’d been minor members of the Gotham City elite ever since, Brannigan’s grandfather and father had made some iffy investments and the family had dropped from obscenely wealthy to just absurdly wealthy. The family home had been sold off a couple decades back, in one of the only straightforward transactions Jason had found. This place is the cheaper version of the real thing. Still old, still expensive, but not quite as aristocratic as the original. He’d gotten the feeling that Brannigan himself could be described the same way.

Dick scales up the wall surrounding the house like it’s nothing and vanishes inside before Jason can even get started. He curses and scrambles up after him, trying to avoid making too much noise or setting off any alarm systems. This stuff isn’t his style—he’d much rather just walk in with his guns out and make it clear that he’s in charge of the situation.

By the time he lands on Brannigan’s unnecessarily giant lawn, Dick’s gone.

* * *

For a man with a lot of money, Brannigan doesn’t seem to have invested much of it in security. Dick hasn’t seen a single camera or motion detector since they arrived, and the wall was in such poor repair that he hadn’t even needed to try to find footholds in it. There’s even a nice, sturdy trellis right next to Brannigan’s balcony. Clearly, he’s the kind of man who assumes that living in a nice neighbourhood makes him immune to property crime.

He lands on the balcony silently, keeping himself tucked away from the large glass doors. A quick glance tells him that they aren’t even locked, and the room inside is dark. It only takes him a few seconds to open the door and get inside, shutting it carefully behind him.

One last look outside reveals a shadow darting across the lawn—Jason, he thinks, hopefully able to find his own way inside.

The house is quiet and dark, although there had been an obnoxious luxury car parked out front when they’d arrived. It’s possible that the occupants are asleep; it’s not overly late, but not everyone in Gotham is a night owl. The room he’d come in through was a sunroom of sorts, with only a few chairs and a table in it, so he heads further into the house. Most of the doors in the hallway he enters are open, and he immediately hones in on what looks like a home office. That seems like a good place to start.

He slips down the hall and pauses at the door, listening for any signs of life. Just as he's about to head in, he sees a flicker of motion in the shiny brass doorknob. As he glances at it, he realizes it's a shadowy figure, a knife held in its hand—pointed right at him.

* * *

Jason pauses just inside the wall, taking a look around while Dick scales the trellis across the yard. He's about to try to find his own way into Brannigan’s house when he sees someone—something?—dart across the lawn, moving more quickly than a normal person could. They’re in black, from head to toe, but when a car passes by, he sees a glint of gold on the figure's head. Something about the look is familiar to him; he can’t place it, exactly, but he picks up speed anyway, more concerned with the new player than with any potential security systems. Clearly, someone's already aware that they're here, which means this was probably a trap. He really wishes he'd taken the time to finish looking into Brannigan.

Not wanting to risk the trellis, Jason tries a side door and finds it open: suspicious enough that he almost doesn’t go inside. After a moment’s wait with no sign of anyone, and nothing showing up on infrared or night-vision, he decides it's not worth the time it would take to find another way in. With guns in hand, he works his way through the narrow hallway and into the kitchen. It’s empty as well.

From upstairs, he hears a crash.

* * *

Dick goes hard into a side-table, wincing as it splinters beneath him, fragments of wood mixing with broken porcelain from a vase that had been on it. He’s forced to roll out of the way as his attacker's blade swings past him, missing him by a breath. Grabbing a handful of porcelain shards, he turns to throw them in the face of whoever's coming after him—

They bounce off the Talon’s mask ineffectively.

Shit.

It’s not one that Dick’s seen before, or if it is, they’ve got a new outfit. There’s no flash to this one, no personalized touches, just all-black standard tactical gear and unadorned owl eyes for a mask. He’s fought enough Talons to know that staying still is courting death—no pun intended—so he rolls to his feet and flips himself up onto the desk that fills the middle of the room. The Talon flicks a knife at him, but Dick’s already in the air, spinning a kick into the Talon’s face.

It lands, which is a surprise. Talons are usually faster than this.

“Did they undercook you?” he asks, doing a somersault away from the Talon’s flashing blades and dropping into a sweeping leg motion that the Talon leaps to avoid. “You seem a little stiff. Maybe they hit the wrong button on the microwave when they thawed you out. Are you more of a defrost setting or a popcorn setting?”

The Talon doesn’t respond. Dick hates when villains are the silent, stabby type. It’s so much harder to distract them when they don’t banter back.

Dick kicks the rolling office chair at the Talon, but it’s heavier than he expected; the Talon simply leaps onto it, then launches itself at Dick, who finds himself trapped between the Talon and the desk. He drops to the ground, hoping to avoid the blades, and succeeds only to get a sharp kick to the ribs instead, one that knocks him back hard into the solid wood behind him. He tries to roll away, but the next kick catches him in nearly the same spot. He can feel his ribs crack with the impact, and the air gets driven from his lungs. He’s in trouble.

* * *

Dick is on the floor, not moving; the would-be assassin stands over him, knives in hand.

Jason makes as much noise as he can running down the hallway, hoping to distract the figure in black before they can get another hit on Nightwing. It works, briefly, as the assassin glances up at him—and Jason realizes he’s facing a Talon.

A lot of pieces click into place about Brannigan’s role in all of this, but he’ll deal with that later. Right now his priority is stopping the Talon and getting Dick out of here.

Luckily, Red Hood has something Nightwing doesn’t: long range weaponry, and the space to use it.

The Talon dodges the first shot, but the second catches it in the shoulder, and the third wings its side, leaving a trail through its armour. Jason has to switch to defence after that, dodging out of the way of a knife sent at his throat, but he manages to get off a couple more shots, enough to keep the Talon busy. He risks a glance at Dick, who’s starting to get up, then takes another shot at the Talon, catching it in the side again.

When the Talon lunges at him, Jason is forced to change tactics, bringing the butt of his gun down hard on the Talon’s hand. He feels bones shatter, but that doesn’t stop the Talon from slicing across Jason's ribs, his armour just barely stopping the blade. For a few seconds, Jason debates trying to get the Talon with the taser built into his armour, but he’s not sure he wants to get that close to it. He knows for a fact that shooting them in the head is a pretty effective way of stopping them. He just needs it to stay still for two seconds.

Dick rolls upright, suddenly, and tries to catch the Talon off-guard with a rabbit-quick punch at its side, right where Jason's earlier shot had cut it. The punch lands, but the Talon twists back with a burst of speed, knife in hand—Dick’s not moving as well as he should be, and the Talon plunges the blade into Dick’s arm, missing his shoulder joint only because Dick’s reflexes let him shift to avoid the worst of it. The Talon grabs onto Dick and tries to dig the knife in further. Dick groans through gritted teeth as the weapon cuts deeper.

Jason shoots the Talon in the head. Twice, for good measure.

* * *

Dick sees the Talon’s head snap back before it drops, dragging the knife from his arm painfully. He breathes in and out as shallowly as possible, trying not to jostle his broken ribs, and looks up to see Jason fire another shot at the Talon’s chest.

“Good work,” Dick says. He winces as he tries to stand up straight, closing his eyes for a second to re-centre himself.

“Very good work indeed,” a man’s voice says, the haughty tones of the old Gotham wealthy thick on his words.

Dick opens his eyes slowly to see Rupert Brannigan the third standing the doorway. He's got four heavily-armed guards around him, and Dick can hear more in the hallway, their heavy boots audible even with the thick carpeting.

“A shame about my office, though. That table was my great-grandmother’s. I suppose I shouldn’t expect you people to have any appreciation for the finer things in life.”

Dick bites back a bitter smile. Although neither of them had come from money, he and Jason had both spent a lot of their lives in Wayne Manor, surrounded by the kind of antiques and priceless art that make Brannigan's collection look like a flea market stall. He can’t say that, of course, but the thought is enough to help him get past the pain in his side.

“Maybe you should have sold the table to buy yourself a better quality assassin,” Dick says.

“Yes, well. When you’re trying to get back into the good graces of a certain Court, they don’t tend to give you their best.” Brannigan sneers down at the remains of the Talon. “However, he did he job well enough. With those injuries, it won't take my men long to take you down.”

“I’m not injured,” Jason says, quietly. The click of his gun as he reloads sounds particularly loud in the silence that follows.

* * *

“I must say, I don’t quite understand why you’re here,” Brannigan says after a moment. “Everything I’ve heard indicates that you’re not exactly on good terms with the bat-themed irritations of my fine city.”

“Can’t say that I am,” Jason replies, letting his lower class Gotham accent roll out in response to Brannigan’s attempt to claim the city. Jason doubts that this puffed-up wet fart of a man has ever seen a hint of the real Gotham. The city isn’t the high towers and sprawling robber baron mansions haunted by Brannigan and his ilk, it’s the streets, all of them, the ones in quiet working class neighbourhoods with kids out playing and the dingy alleys and the ones lined with Chinese restaurants and the ones with strip clubs, with bookstores, with rehab clinics, with tiny cafes and homemade soap stores and gun shops and churches and anarchist collectives and everything else that makes up Gotham. Guys like Brannigan think they own the city, but five minutes out in the streets and they’d be crying for their mothers.

“And yet, here you are. Helping them out.”

“Nah,” Jason says. He checks his gun over casually, then spins it around his finger a few times. With everyone’s eyes on the flashing metal, he’s hoping they don’t notice him palming a smoke pellet from his belt. “You see, I might not like the bats much, but I really, really hate owls. Especially that thing they do where they puke up all the bits of mice that they couldn’t eat. Gross.”

He shifts back on his feet and watches confusion flicker across Brannigan’s face. He’s sure he’s been insulted, but he can’t quite figure out how to respond. Men like him so rarely have anyone actually talk back that it tends to leave them paralyzed when it does happen. Jason's gotten particularly good at using that to his advantage, and he smiles grimly behind his mask when Brannigan's expression solidifies into petulant rage.

“You—” Brannigan starts, right in time for Jason to launch the smoke pellet at him. The cloud fills the room almost instantaneously, and Jason shoots out the window, then grabs Dick, clapping a hand over his mouth to muffle any groans, and hauls him under the desk.

Like he’d expected, Brannigan coughs out orders for some of his men to get to the window, and the rest to go downstairs and find them. He waits for the crowd in front of the door to vanish and nudges Dick towards it, following him as quietly as he can through the still-heavy smoke. They reach the hallway and break into a run, Dick trying to keep his pained breathing quiet. His arm is dripping blood, but the hallway has a thick, patterned carpet that should hide it.

“This way,” Jason says. He presses open a panel on the wall, which reveals a plain, narrow staircase.

“Of course this is the kind of place where they hide the servant’s stairs,” Dick whispers.

“Useful for us,” Jason says. He heads down first, turning on infrared again in case anyone’s been smart enough to check the kitchen area. There’s no sign of Brannigan or his guards, so he waves Dick down and finds the hallway he’d entered through. Now all they need is to get across the lawn, which is filled with Brannigan's men, and over the wall to where they’d left their bikes. Easy.

* * *

Dick feels himself going into hyperfocus from the adrenaline pumping through him and knows he’s only got so long before the crash hits. He glances out the door, looking for a clear path, but he can already hear Brannigan’s men heading this way. They need another distraction. As he glances out again, he sees a flashlight beam reflect off the shiny chrome of a bumper and gets an idea.

“What do you have that explodes?” he whispers.

Jason pulls out a small device, built like a cherry bomb but with a much bigger punch, and hands him the explosive and the detonator.

“Perfect. Anyone by Brannigan’s car?”

Jason looks, then shakes his head. Dick can’t see his face, but he suspects that Jason’s smiling; he’s always enjoyed destroying status symbols, and Brannigan’s overpriced showboat car is definitely that. Dick ducks down and throws one of them underhand across the lawn. It comes to a stop right under the car, just where Dick had aimed it. He presses the button on the detonator and ducks back inside as the bomb goes off, wincing at the screeching sound of metal tearing itself apart.

At Jason’s signal, he darts out the door, forcing himself to ignore the pain as he sprints across the lawn and up the wall, throwing himself down the other side and regretting it when the landing sends spikes of agony through his side. Broken ribs. Right.

Jason lands next to him a moment later.

“You good to ride?” he asks.

Dick nods. He’s even mostly sure he’s telling the truth.

* * *

Jason patches Dick up for the second time that day, cleaning and bandaging the wound on his arm first before wrapping his ribs. Dick had snapped at him a couple of times as he’d started, but Jason had snapped right back and then flicked the cut on Dick’s arm hard enough for Dick to yelp.

“You want to get infected?” he’d asked. “Because I’ll leave, if you do. You could probably do most things one-handed, I’m sure. But good luck wrapping your ribs with only one good arm.”

Dick had gone quiet after that, but in a sullen way. Jason had decided to just let him sulk and focused on getting him cleaned up and bandaged. He’s just finishing checking over the gauze around Dick’s arm when Dick says, “We should have gone after the kid.”

Ah. That’s what this is about.

“Maybe,” Jason says. “But Scarecrow was the bigger threat.”

“Scarecrow dropped with one punch,” Dick says. “That’s not a threat. We could have split up.”

Jason packs up the first aid kit and heads into Dick’s bathroom without answering. Once he’s put it away, he comes back to the doorway and leans there, looking at Dick. He’s still half in his gear, the top of it puddled around his waist, skin bare above that where it isn't wrapped in bandages. His expression is a mix of anger and guilt, and Jason’s over it. It’s been a long fucking day, and he’s not here to deal with Dick’s self-flagellation.

“I remember suggesting that. You said no.” Dick looks up at him sharply and Jason cuts him off. “I know. You think I don't hate losing? I get it. This sucks. A lot. But—” Jason pauses, not wanting to get into a yelling match. “Don't get mad at me because of the choices you made. We both did what we thought was best with the information we had.”

“He killed his own father,” Dick says, an edge to his voice and fire in his eyes. “What do you think that’s going to do to him?”

Jason laughs bitterly. “Nothing worse than what his father already did to him,” he says. “I looked him up while you were dealing with the cops. In and out of foster care, a hospital record that’s about three times longer than even the most accident prone kid, old man in jail half the time and beating the shit out of a series of girlfriends when he’s out.”

Dick shakes his head, but Jason continues.

“Look. I’m not saying he’s not going to be screwed up from this whole thing. No one would get out of this without some pretty lasting trauma. But—the rest of them? The guard at the docks, the girl who walked in front of the truck, that guy who got shot in the head by his wife, the traffickers, all of them—they all had ties to Court stuff. That was all the Court cleaning up loose ends. I couldn’t put it together until I saw the Talon, but that’s what it had to be. Brannigan trying to win his way back into the Court by being their janitor.”

“So?” Dick asks.

“So. His old man didn’t have any connection with the Court that I could find. They used the kid because they could set up the traffickers to pick him up. If we hadn’t gotten there first, he would have taken out more of them, then probably gotten killed himself. But him killing his father? That was his own choice.”

Dick slumps back on the couch and Jason stands up. He wants to walk over to him and put a hand on his shoulder, try to get him to understand that sometimes the things that seem like they should break people are the things they need to heal. He can only hope that’s true of the kid. Even if it's not, there's only so much any of them can do. Sometimes you just lose.

Instead, he says, “Get some sleep. I’ll be in touch if I learn anything.”

Without a word, Dick heads into his room. Jason breathes down his irritation as he dismantles the computer network he’d built in Dick’s living room, transferring all his work over to his own system back home. He glances at Dick's door once, then takes off into the night. He's exhausted, physically, mentally, and emotionally, and he just wants to go home.

* * *

Dick isn’t expecting sleep to come easily, not after the events of the day, but his body has other plans. When he wakes up, it’s late morning; the sun is bright outside his window and there are birds chirping nearby. It’s almost peaceful, as long as he doesn’t move or think, and as long as he ignores the aches in his side and arm.

He forces himself to get up and replace his bandages, then stretches as much as he can without jarring his ribs or re-opening his various cuts. When he's done, he drifts into his kitchen, not quite hungry yet but drawn to the idea of coffee. His dishrack is full of clean dishes, but Jason’s coffee mug is still sitting in the sink. He stares at it for a long moment, trying to figure out whether he’s pissed off at Jason or just angry at himself. It doesn’t really matter, either way. Jason’s gone, and he was right that Dick can’t go back and make different choices.

If they’d actually caught Brannigan and taken him down, that would be one thing. At least he’d feel like some form of justice had occurred. But he’d failed to stop the kid, and he’d failed to get Brannigan. He has no doubt that Brannigan has already destroyed any evidence linking him to Crane, and he knows that the Court’s connections will keep him safe. Even if he’d let them get away, and Scarecrow had been caught, Brannigan had gotten the job done. Besides, the Court has their own way of dealing with failure, if they deemed Brannigan’s actions insufficient. They wouldn’t let mere lower-case-c courts pass judgment on one of their own.

He makes coffee, drinks it, makes breakfast, eats it, and then wanders aimlessly around his apartment, restless but too sore to do anything about it. He reaches for his phone a few times, thinking about calling Jason, but he’s still not sure if he’s angry at him or not. Calling him just to pick a fight might make Dick feel better for about ten minutes, but he’d end up feeling worse after that.

In the end, he sits on the couch, flipping through his notes from the earlier cases. Jason’s added to them, here and there, comments in the margins about how everything ties together. So many people dead, just because they’d somehow crossed the path of the Court of Owls.

He realizes that he’s been sitting and staring at one of Jason’s notes for so long that he sees spots when he blinks, and leans carefully back onto the couch. The anger’s starting to drain away, although the guilt is still there, hanging on around the edges of his exhaustion. He drops his head onto the pillow at the end of the couch, frowning when he catches a whiff of Jason’s—shampoo? Aftershave? Dick isn’t quite sure.

It had been… Good. Having Jason with him for this. Not just because he’d ended up needing the backup, or because Jason’s skills were a good complement to his own, but because he’d genuinely enjoyed his company. It can be easy to forget that, sometimes, to remember only the times they’ve been on opposite sides of things, or when Jason had pushed him too far, or when Dick had lashed out. Jason’s put so much effort into being a threat that Dick has to remind himself of the fact that under all of that, he’s funny and smart, and a little ridiculous, and sometimes a bit too fussy about things like dirty dishes and getting the right kind of antibiotic cream. He’s definitely more Alfred’s kid than Bruce’s, when it comes to that part of things.

More than that, though, there’s something that’s shifted between them lately. It’s what makes Dick look a little too long when Jason’s stretching, push him a little to see if he can get him to smile, a real smile. It’s heat running along his spine when Jason touches him, even if it’s just to put a band aid on him.

It would be complicated, he knows. The two of them have too much history, too many sharp edges that don’t fit right. Still. He wonders sometimes if they might be heading in a direction where the history becomes the past, and the sharp edges might blunt themselves, fitting together rather than cutting each other.

He thinks he'd like that.

* * *

Jason pauses outside Dick’s door, not sure if he should have come here or if he just should have called. It’s too late to change his mind now, so he knocks, and waits, and waits longer.

Just as he’s about to leave, Dick opens the door, messy-haired and bleary-eyed. He's only wearing a pair of boxers, and Jason tries to tell himself that he’s staring at Dick’s bare chest because he’s checking on his ribs. It’s only partially a lie, because any other thoughts get knocked aside by the truly impressive collection of bruises ranging across Dick’s side. Even Jason's aren't that bad.

“Damn,” Jason says, sympathetically.

“Mm,” Dick says. He walks back inside, but he leaves the door open; Jason assumes that’s an invitation, and follows.

Dick disappears into the kitchen and Jason lingers awkwardly in the living room. Yesterday, he would have just flopped onto the couch, but he’s not sure how welcome he is right now, and he’s too tired to deal with a fight. He’d expected to fall asleep as soon as he got home, but he'd quickly realized that he was going to get caught in a vortex of his own thoughts unless he got something done. He'd ended up spending the rest of the night sorting through the rest of the information on Brannigan, armed with the knowledge that the Court was behind him, before crashing hard in the early morning. It's late afternoon now, but he's still groggy.

Dick reappears with two mugs of coffee, handing Jason’s to him wordlessly before sitting carefully in the chair. It’s the same mug Jason had been using before, with the Gotham Knights logo on it, and he really hopes that Dick had at least rinsed it out before refilling it.

“I washed it,” Dick says, voice rough with sleep. Jason looks up, a bit sheepishly, and Dick gives him an amused smile that bleeds the tension out of Jason's shoulders. They're okay, for now.

“Hey, given the stack of dishes I did yesterday, I wasn’t convinced you knew what soap was,” Jason says, dropping onto the couch. The spring from before jabs at his thigh and he sighs. “Your couch is stabbing me again.”

“You did promise it monogamy and then left it for your chair,” Dick says.

“My apologies,” Jason says to the couch, patting it gently. “Next time Dick’s out, I’ll break in here and steal you away.”

“I just got that couch to fit my butt perfectly,” Dick says. “Don’t woo it away from me.”

Jason tries to figure out a quip about Dick’s butt, stumbles over his thoughts, and takes a sip of too hot coffee instead.

“You know the Court better than most people,” he says, putting the mug down and reaching into his bag for his tablet. “How connected are they outside of Gotham?”

Dick looks thoughtful. “Pretty connected, at some levels, but they don’t have the same kind of pull outside Gotham. More—information gathering, networking. Not so much control.”

Jason smirks. “Good.” He turns on the tablet and connects it to Dick’s TV. “Knowing it was the Court filled in most of the blanks with Brannigan’s companies.” An image pops onto the screen, all the different companies mapped out in a complex, multi-layered spiderweb of evil. “I know we can’t take him down for what he used Scarecrow to do. He’s scrubbed that clean, and he’s got pretty high level lawyers on retainer.”

“Right,” Dick says. “The Court looks after their own.”

“Well—” Jason says. “Yes. Most of the time.”

Dick looks over at him. Jason taps a few things, bringing up old legal files. “Look. Here, and here—those were Brannigan’s father’s companies. This one was his grandfather’s. That’s the sale of their house. None of these have the Court anywhere near them. I went digging for more.” He brings up a new flurry of information. “The Court will protect its own if they’re, say, murdering innocents. Destroying irreplaceable wetlands. Skimping on fire safety and letting a dozen people burn to death in a tenement fire. That kind of stuff. But if you lose money? If your bad business choices are staining your reputation? They won’t come near you.”

“So if we go after his businesses, make him look like he might be…”

“Poor,” Jason says.

“Then the Court might drop him altogether.”

“Yep,” Jason says. “And here’s the best part: he’s put so much effort into hiding his tracks that he’s got most of his money in off-shore accounts, not tied to him at all. All we have to do is move that out, and he’s halfway to broke.”

“And the other half?” Dick asks.

“Well. They didn’t get Capone for the bootlegging. Or the murder.”

“They got him for taxes,” Dick says, starting to smile.

“And luckily for the IRS, I've got both his falsified business records, and the real ones, nicely gift-wrapped just for them.” Jason looks up at the screen, then looks at Dick, a more serious expression on his face. “I get it, you know. About the kid. And I wish we could take this guy down for that. But we did stop him from doing any more harm, and this can put him away.”

He doesn’t say, is that enough? Can it be enough?, but that’s what he’s really asking. If not, well. He can always just shoot Brannigan in the head.

* * *

Dick watches Brannigan’s finances float by on the screen, all the bits and pieces of his wealth that he thinks make him not only untouchable, but more worthy than the rest of the world. Like they mean anything, really. Like those numbers are worth more than the lives of other people.

“Yes,” Dick says, answering the question that Jason hadn't asked. “Yeah. Good.”

“Good,” Jason echoes, a faint smile on his face as he looks at Dick.

Jason fills him in on the rest of it over takeout breakfast burritos, the dinner of champions. The victims were mostly just people who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, or looked a little too hard into something they should have ignored, the way the Court saw it. Conrad Wagner, the man whose wife had shot him, was the only one other than the traffickers who’d actively worked for the Court, although he’d been too low level to know it. He’d gotten greedy, tried to embezzle from them.

“And I heard from Leslie,” Jason says, carefully. “She’s got friends who work in the pediatrics ward where they have the kid. He’s starting to come out of it. She says that the therapists they have there are some of the best.”

Dick nods. He’s not sure that Barrett Kraus will ever recover fully, but there’s hope, at least. Sometimes that’s all you can ask for.

Jason looks down, then picks up both of their plates and heads over to the sink. Dick shakes his head and says, “I have a dishwasher, you know.”

“I know. I just don’t see the point when I can wash these by hand and they’ll be clean within minutes,” Jason replies.

They slip into a mock-argument about it, and Dick lets it pull him out of his own thoughts.

When Jason’s finished, he grabs his stuff and packs up. “I’ve got to go—places to be, people to punch,” he says, standing by Dick’s door. “But—this was…”

“Good,” Dick says. “This was good.” He means it, too, despite everything.

“Yeah.” Jason smiles at him, briefly but genuinely. “Let’s meet up over a warm corpse again sometime.”

“Gross,” Dick says. “Go away.” But he’s laughing as he closes the door behind him.

* * *

The wheels of justice grind finely but slowly, or something like that. Jason tracks Brannigan’s case though the IRS, then the DEA, and then the FBI, who get called in when some of the accounts have ties to international organized crime. It takes months. Months where Brannigan is living freely, enjoying the perks of life with the benediction of the Owls upon him. Sometimes Jason considers just killing him, but he and Dick are in a good place, and he’s pretty sure cold-blooded execution would put an end to that.

Jason had actually been the first one to reach out after that case, when he’d needed a second set of hands to clean up a drug cartel that had been making moves. Then Dick had called him up to deal with a particularly vicious gang war in Blüdhaven. Dick had brought him in to take down a Riddler copycat while Dick dealt with the actual Riddler, who was in a homicidal rage over the "second rate knock off"; Jason had gotten Dick to use his spy connections to track down a con artist who’d made off with charity funds for a local hospital.

Sometimes they even hung out when they weren't working a case.

They’ve never talked about where things between them might go. Jason’s caught Dick looking at him often enough to know that the interest is mutual, but things are complicated enough navigating what might be friendship, especially given their respective lives, that neither of them has moved to push it further.

It doesn’t help that they’ve had a lot of time to get good at picking fights with each other and a lot less time to get good at enjoying each other’s company. Dick still loses his temper when he thinks Jason’s gone too far; Jason still gets pissed off when Dick automatically sides with Bruce. They fight, they avoid each other, but then they drift back together again. They don’t tend to apologize, but Jason’s gotten good at bringing Dick the right kind of coffee, and Dick knows when to show up with a new book that he thinks Jason might like.

Today, Jason is bringing Dick something even better than coffee: justice.

He knocks on Dick’s door in the middle of the afternoon, a six pack of beer under one arm and two bags of microwave popcorn tucked into his jacket pocket. Dick opens the door and blinks at him.

“Are we having movie night?” he asks.

“Something like that,” Jason says, grinning. He hands the beer to Dick. “Put that in the fridge.”

When Dick comes back, Jason’s in the process of getting Dick’s laptop and television to play nicely together. Dick sits on the couch next to him, tapping a foot as he tries to not ask too many questions, and looking up at the screen as Jason brings up a full set of security video feeds.

“Is that Brannigan’s place?” Dick asks, going still and leaning forward. "He's really upgraded the security since our visit."

“Ironically, he made it much easier to spy on him,” Jason says. Another tap brings up a view of the streets around Brannigan's house, showing an unusual number of vans parked along them. “And that, my friend, is a whole bunch of unmarked vehicles filled with federal agents.”

* * *

Dick stares up at the screen, realizing what Jason is showing him, and says, “Oh my god, finally.”

“They’ve dotted every i and crossed every t,” Jason says. “Trust me, I double-checked their work. The case is iron-clad.”

Still looking up at the screen, Dick reaches over and pats him firmly on the leg. “Good work.”

“We’ve got about twenty minutes before they head in,” Jason says. “Here, I’ve got audio.”

Dick's apartment is immediately filled with the sound of the feds planning the raid. It’s pretty standard stuff, but Dick’s pleased to hear the attention to detail they’re bringing to the job.

After a few minutes, Jason nudges him in the side, bringing his attention away from the TV. He has Dick’s laptop open on the coffee table in front of them, with a pile of windows open, one on top of the other. Dick peers down at them.

“Bank accounts?” he asks.

“All of Brannigan’s supposedly-hidden offshore accounts that the feds didn’t find,” Jason says. “I figure we start moving the money out about the same time the FBI moves in, while he’s distracted by his arrest. I can set it all up now so we can still enjoy the show.” He looks at Dick with a grin. “Got any ideas about what to do with all this cash?”

“A few,” Dick says, smiling back.

“Good. There’s a lot here. And some of the accounts are shared—the Court, I would assume. They’re not going to be too happy with him if they think he’s trying to grab the money and run before the feds can find it. Don't worry, I can route it so they can't trace it.”

Dick leans in and looks at the accounts he can see. “Wow,” he says. “I mean, that’s not much compared to, you know, some people we know. But that can do a lot of good.”

“I hope so,” Jason says. “OK. Let’s start with, what—lunch programs for kids?”

“Yeah,” Dick says. “Sounds good. Oh, I know! Can we fund a campaign to build better safety fences around Gotham Rail? And, oh, Mrs. Wagner. The lady who shot her asshole husband. She's still dealing with legal fees, and Mrs. Ferreira, her neighbour, she could use some help too. And then—scholarships for refugees. Mental health programs for kids. Food banks.” He pauses and looks at Jason. "Tell me if we're about to run out of money. I've got a lot of ideas."

* * *

Jason looks at the final bank account they need to clear out. On the TV, the feds are starting to get ready to move.

“Can I have this last one?” he asks.

“Sure,” Dick says, coming back from the kitchen with a bowl of popcorn and two bottles of beer. He puts them down on the table and Jason sighs, grabbing coasters and wiping the condensation off.

“That table cost me six bucks, I’m not worried about water stains,” Dick says, but he puts his beer back on the coaster when Jason gives him a look. He likes to take care of his things, or Dick’s things, in this case. Growing up without much of his own ingrained that into him pretty hard, and Dick knows that enough not to argue with him. Besides, Dick's got his own quirks. He could easily afford a better quality coffee table, but he always buys the cheap stuff unless someone forces him to upgrade. Jason's never asked, but he figures that Dick doesn't much like stuff tying him down. Cheap stuff doesn't grow roots.

“So what are you doing with the last of his money?” Dick asks, leaning into Jason’s arm to look at the laptop.

“Setting up a trust fund,” Jason says. Dick looks at him curiously as Jason sets up the last transfer, then activates the program to run them all. Jason sits back and turns up the volume on the TV before answering Dick’s unasked question. “The girl and the baby, the ones I found when I was trying to track down—”

“Right,” Dick says. The kid hadn’t really recovered, still institutionalized, and it’s a sore spot. Jason leans into him a little, an acknowledgement of that.

“Yeah. They’re doing well. Leslie keeps in touch with their foster family, says they’re really settling in now. I thought—they’ll need a place of their own someday, maybe tuition, that kind of stuff. Even if they get adopted or something, getting some extra cash will help.” He also knows that a lot of foster kids get dumped out on their own when they hit eighteen. He trusts Leslie when she says that these people are genuinely good, caring people, but he wants them to have a backup if things go wrong.

He’s still looking at the screen, making sure everything’s running properly, when Dick reaches up and touches his face. Jason looks over automatically, and Dick leans in—not to kiss him, not this time, but to rest his forehead against Jason’s. It’s startlingly intimate, and Jason's breath catches in his chest.

“You’re good people,” Dick says, softly.

Jason can feel himself blushing, and he pulls away, ducking his head in hopes that Dick won’t notice. He fiddles with the laptop some more, then looks up at the TV as the feds start to move.

“Yeah, yeah. Let’s just—watch this asshole get his.”

* * *

Dick can’t remember the last time he had seen Jason blush, but there’s clearly a line of pink across the tops of his cheeks right now. It’s almost adorable. He desperately wants to tease Jason about it just to see if he can get more of it, but he also doesn’t want to piss him off.

Besides, Jason’s right. He’s very much looking forward to seeing Brannigan get taken down.

On the screen, the agents are arraying themselves around Brannigan’s house. He’s pleased to see that the new car parked in front isn’t quite as nice as the one he’d blown up, and that there’s still a bit of a scorch mark on the concrete. Inside the house, Brannigan is obliviously sitting in his living room, watching golf. He’s only got a few of his usual guards around.

As the feds move in, Dick grabs a handful of popcorn, eating it happily as he watches the lead agent ring the doorbell, then call loudly into the house, announcing their presence and advising Brannigan to come peacefully. Brannigan freezes like a deer— or an owl—in the headlights, then scrambles to his feet, calling for his guards. The lead agent calls out another warning, then radios the rest of the team to let them know that Brannigan might be on the move.

Their quarry and his guards are indeed moving, right to a hidden escape route. Dick frowns, but Jason laughs.

“That passage was originally a tunnel out to a bomb shelter,” he says. “The previous owners added in the 50s. Fun fact: they went and got the building permits and filed the blueprints with the city. I didn’t even have to send them to the feds. They already had them.”

And so, when Brannigan pops out of the ground just behind a fake section of fence, he finds himself facing down a number of well-armed agents, their weapons trained on him. He smiles weakly and starts stammering out an excuse, claiming that he’d thought he was under attack by some sort of gang, but the agents just hoist him out of the tunnel and start reading him his rights. The look of shock on his face as they cuff him gives Dick a vicious thrill.

“Don’t you know who I am?!” Brannigan asks, and Jason laughs, taking a long drink of his beer.

“I can’t believe he tried that,” he says.

“He can’t believe it didn’t work,” Dick says, as Brannigan stares at the agent next to him with his mouth hanging open.

“Not so big a deal now, Brannigan,” Jason says. He stretches his arms out across the back of Dick’s couch, looking pleased with himself. “Small fish, getting smaller.”

Dick leans back into Jason’s arm and watches Brannigan get gently shoved into the back of one of the FBI vehicles. His men are being rounded up with him, and they’re not putting up a fight. As they drive away, Jason reaches down and switches the feed to the Gotham FBI field office.

“Now comes the best part,” he says.

* * *

Brannigan spends the entire car ride desperately trying to convince the officers that they must have the wrong man, he’s a fine upstanding member of Gotham’s high society, if he could just talk to this judge or that police captain or—well, he’s got friends in high places, you know. They’ll sort it out. He’s sure that this is just a misunderstanding. Jason’s half-listening, half-watching Dick, who’s clearly enjoying this. He knows it’s been weighing on him, not being able to catch Brannigan, especially after they’d failed to save the kid. Taking him down and doing some good in the process won’t make up for the harm he’s done, but there’s a certain kind of poetry in using the Court’s money to help the people they view as scum.

“I demand my lawyer!” Brannigan says as they finally arrive at the FBI office.

“Of course,” says the lead agent, perfectly composed. Brannigan blinks at him, then says, “Well? Where’s my phone?”

“Your phone is evidence, Mr. Brannigan. Please, step this way. We have a public phone you can use.”

Brannigan looks offended at the concept, and Jason rolls his eyes. Public phones! Too commonplace for such a man as him. Don’t they have anything gold-plated he could use?

However he may feel about it, Brannigan picks up the phone and dials his lawyer. This is what Jason’s been waiting for, and he switches audio feeds quickly.

“Stokes? Stokes! There’s been some kind of misunderstanding—the FBI—”

Percival Stokes, one of the Court’s lesser lawyers, cuts off Brannigan mid-explanation. “I’m afraid I’m no longer retained by you, Mr. Brannigan. May I suggest a different lawyer? I believe you have enough left in your assets to afford—well. Perhaps a public defender.”

“What? What do you mean? I pay for your services!”

“Technically, your, ah, business partners pay for my services, and I'm afraid they have decided that you are no longer an asset to their company.”

“What do you mean, ‘no longer an asset’?” Brannigan’s voice is rising in pitch and volume, but he’s oblivious to the concerned looks he’s getting from those around him.

“Well, your, ah, legal assets have been frozen by the Internal Revenue Service. Your other assets have gone missing—and don't think that your former associates haven't noticed their investments vanishing as well. I assure you, they have.” The colour starts to drain from Brannigan's face, but Mr Stokes continues, ruthlessly. “Your activities have drawn the attention of quite a number of agencies. You are, in other words, a penniless liability. Now. I’m afraid my time is valuable, unlike you. Please don’t call again.”

The line goes dead, but all Brannigan does is slowly lower the phone away from his ear. He then remains motionless, staring into space, until the lead agent walks over and gently removes the phone from his hand and steers him away.

* * *

Dick watches with satisfaction as a slumping, broken Brannigan is brought into an interrogation room. Jason flips the sound off, and shakes his head at Dick’s look. “They don’t have audio in the rooms,” he says. “They use recorders.”

“Thank you,” Dick says. “For—all of this. You put a lot of work into it.”

Jason shrugs, glancing away. “I don’t like letting bad guys get away any more than you do,” he says. “And I don’t like guys that use people. Especially rich guys like him—they just see everyone else as disposable.”

“Still.” Dick leans into Jason’s side, smiling when Jason drops his arm down around Dick’s shoulders. They sit in silence for a while, watching as Brannigan squirms and fidgets as he’s questioned.

“Think he’ll turn on the Court?” Jason asks.

“If he’s smart,” Dick says. “Chances are nothing will come of it, but he might be able to get witness protection out of it.”

“So, no,” Jason says.

“Nah,” Dick agrees. “That would mean giving up his chance at getting back to them. He’s built his whole life around being a member of the elite, and he sees them as the best of the best. There’s no way he’d give that up.”

They drop silent again. Dick takes a sip of his beer and thinks about the beginning of this case, the dead man and the vanishing killer. That damp, foul alley was a long way away from the rarefied air preferred by the Court of Owls, but they’d tracked the mud from that alley all the way to the Court’s doors and kicked them in, just a little. There’s parts he regrets, will always regret, but he can’t dwell on those too long. Besides, they found a way to pull good out of the horror. Saved some people. Improved some lives.

Maybe improved their own lives, a little.

He watches Jason take a sip of his beer and put it back on the coaster, carefully, and smiles when Jason looks at him curiously.

“What?” Jason asks.

“Nothing,” Dick says. “Just—I can’t believe you brought beer and popcorn for this.”

“Hey, it’s a good combination,” Jason says. “And don’t think I didn’t notice that you ate most of that popcorn yourself.”

It’s easier now to fall into this, bantering instead of arguing, a level of comfort that wasn’t there before. Dick doesn’t know where they’ll end up, or how long it’ll take them to get there, but that’s okay. They’ve got a lot of work to do.

And Dick, for one, is looking forward to it.

**Author's Note:**

> Further warnings: a child killing people, non-consensual mind-altering drugs (including use on said child).
> 
> I hope you liked it, Tey! I don't tend to work that much with the darker Gotham villains, so it was interesting trying to figure out how to balance out that part of things with the character development part of things. I hope what I ended up with worked for you.


End file.
